# What to Remove, What to Preserve: Dual-Ambiguity Rectification for All-in-One Image Restoration

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.28526 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.28526/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 32 of its 56 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 30 Jul 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 32)

- [The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Deep Features as a Perceptual Metric](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.03924/) (2018)
- [SwinIR: Image Restoration Using Swin Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.10257/) (2021)
- [Pre-Trained Image Processing Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.00364/) (2020)
- [Uformer: A General U-Shaped Transformer for Image Restoration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.03106/) (2021)
- [Deep Multi-scale Convolutional Neural Network for Dynamic Scene Deblurring](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.02177/) (2016)
- [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)
- [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)
- [MAXIM: Multi-Axis MLP for Image Processing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.02973/) (2022)
- [Deblurring via Stochastic Refinement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.02475/) (2021)
- [Restoring Vision in Adverse Weather Conditions with Patch-Based Denoising Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.14626/) (2022)
- [Learning A Sparse Transformer Network for Effective Image Deraining](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.11950/) (2023)
- [Efficient Frequency Domain-based Transformers for High-Quality Image Deblurring](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.12250/) (2022)
- [InstructIR: High-Quality Image Restoration Following Human Instructions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.16468/) (2024)
- [PromptIR: Prompting for All-in-One Blind Image Restoration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.13090/) (2023)
- [AutoDIR: Automatic All-in-One Image Restoration with Latent Diffusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.10123/) (2023)
- [OneRestore: A Universal Restoration Framework for Composite Degradation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.04621/) (2024)
- [DEA-Net: Single image dehazing based on detail-enhanced convolution and content-guided attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.04805/) (2023)
- [Restoring Images in Adverse Weather Conditions via Histogram Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.10172/) (2024)
- [UniRestore: Unified Perceptual and Task-Oriented Image Restoration Model Using Diffusion Prior](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.13134/) (2025)
- [Degradation-Aware Feature Perturbation for All-in-One Image Restoration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.12630/) (2025)
- [Vision-Language Gradient Descent-driven All-in-One Deep Unfolding Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.16930/) (2025)
- [Language-driven All-in-one Adverse Weather Removal](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.01381/) (2023)
- [Joint Self-Attention and Scale-Aggregation for Self-Calibrated Deraining Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.02763/) (2020)
- [WeatherBench: A Real-World Benchmark Dataset for All-in-One Adverse Weather Image Restoration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.11642/) (2025)
- [Blind Image Decomposition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.11364/) (2021)
- [Mutual Information-driven Triple Interaction Network for Efficient Image Dehazing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.06998/) (2023)
- [Multi-Expert Adaptive Selection: Task-Balancing for All-in-One Image Restoration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.19139/) (2024)
- [Learning Continuous Wasserstein Barycenter Space for Generalized All-in-One Image Restoration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.23169/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

All-in-one image restoration aims to handle diverse degradations within a unified framework. Existing methods commonly encode heterogeneous degradation conditions in a shared latent space, where degradation-related cues and scene content can remain entangled. We characterize the resulting challenge as dual ambiguity: semantic ambiguity in channel-wise modulation and spatial ambiguity in restoration responses, which can lead to content corruption and residual artifacts. To mitigate this issue, we propose DAR-Net, a Dual-Ambiguity Rectification Network for all-in-one image restoration. DAR-Net first introduces a Degradation Archetype Representation (DAR) module to construct a structured degradation state through simplex-constrained archetype mixture modeling. Based on this state, a Semantic Ambiguity Rectification (SeAR) module generates degradation-aware prompts to improve channel-wise conditioning in the decoder. A Spatial Ambiguity Rectification (SpAR) module further regularizes degradation-aware and complementary features toward orthogonal response subspaces, reducing spatial interference between removal and preservation cues. Extensive experiments on standard all-in-one restoration benchmarks show that DAR-Net achieves the best overall performance under both three-degradation and five-degradation settings, improving the average PSNR over the strongest competitor by 0.14 dB and 0.34 dB, respectively; it additionally shows superior performance on CDD-11 and WeatherBench.