The paper presents convergence guarantees for Plug-and-Play (PnP) image restoration algorithms that use annealed noise levels, covering both deterministic and stochastic methods. It identifies explicit nonconvex objectives linked to the final denoising level and proves that iterates become asymptotically stationary with respect to these objectives, without requiring a specific noise decay schedule. The authors validate their theory experimentally on tasks such as inpainting, super‑resolution, demosaicing, and tomography.
By Samuel Hurault
arXiv:2609.00811v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Flow Matching provides an efficient generative prior for image restoration by learning continuous transport between source and data distributions. Howe...
By Jiaqi Zhang, Yiqi Wang, Hongjie Wu, Bohan Guo, Xinan Wang, Zichen Luo, Taotao Cai, Zhi Chen, Mingkai Zheng
arXiv:2607. 25275v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Real-world Image Restoration (Real-IR) aims to recover high-quality (HQ) images from complex and unknown degradations.
By Zhenning Shi, Chen Xu, Junhao Zhang, Kefei Zhang, Linjie Liu, Zhedong Zheng, Tao Li
The paper introduces MS-Flow, a method that represents a flow-based generative model’s trajectory as a sequence of intermediate latent states instead of a single initial code. By enforcing local flow dynamics and coupling trajectory segments with matching penalties, the approach alternates between updating latent states and ensuring consistency with observed data. This strategy reduces memory usage and improves reconstruction quality on tasks such as image inpainting, super‑resolution, and computed tomography.
By Alexander Denker, Zeljko Kereta, Carola-Bibiane Sch\"onlieb, Moshe Eliasof
arXiv:2607. 14894v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Plug-and-play proximal gradient descent (PnP-PGD) enables flexible image reconstruction by using denoisers as implicit priors.
By Guixian Xu, Jinglai Li, Junqi Tang
arXiv:2606. 19802v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Image restoration faces a fundamental tradeoff: methods that minimize error produce blurry reconstructions, while those that maximize perceptual quality yield sharp but less faithful images.
By Nicolas Zilberstein, Morteza Mardani, Santiago Segarra
arXiv:2607. 03517v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Brownian Bridge Diffusion Models (BBDM) offer an appealing framework for image restoration and inverse problems by constructing a stochastic bridge from the clean signal directly to the degraded observation, rather than to pure noise.
By Ron Levi, Michael Elad
arXiv:2608. 10544v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Image restoration is fundamentally constrained by the tradeoff between distortion and perception: minimizing pixel-wise error yields over-smoothed results, whereas optimizing for perceptual realism often introduces structural deviations.
By Sangwoo Jo, Donggeun Ko, Jayeon Kang, Youngsang Kwak, Jaehwa Kwak, Sungjoon Choi
The paper introduces LEADer, a framework that uses local epistemic uncertainty to guide active sampling in diffusion-based image restoration. By adjusting prior strength per pixel and pruning sampling trajectories based on uncertainty traces, LEADer balances detail preservation with artifact suppression and accelerates convergence. The method is plug‑and‑play, theoretically guarantees data consistency and stable convergence, and improves performance across multiple state‑of‑the‑art diffusion models with minimal memory overhead.
By Jiaqi Zhang, Zheng Pang, Rongrong Gao, Qiyuan Zhang, Yang Yang
arXiv:2609.37529v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Pretrained denoisers provide a powerful way to incorporate image priors into restoration algorithms. Plug-and-Play and RED approaches exploit fixed-n...
By Alexandre Lagier, Valentine Tosel, Anne Gagneux, Mathurin Massias, S\'egol\`ene Martin
Bi-FlowGS introduces a bidirectional co-refinement framework that links generative view completion with 3D Gaussian Splatting geometry. It employs Video-to-Geometry Flow Distillation (V2G) to transfer temporal correspondence from restored videos into Gaussian geometry, mitigating the Geometry Cheating problem. Simultaneously, Geometry-to-Video Flow-Guided Restoration (G2V) uses the current 3DGS geometry to guide temporally consistent video restoration, creating a loop where restored videos and optimized geometry iteratively improve each other, leading to better rendering quality and geometric consistency on wide-baseline and 360° benchmarks.
By Yuetong Wang, Jinsheng Quan, Yi Yang, Yawei Luo
arXiv:2603. 00205v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Generative models, particularly Diffusion Models (DM), have shown strong potential for Computed Tomography (CT) reconstruction serving as expressive priors for solving ill-posed inverse problems.
By Jiayang Shi, Lincen Yang, Zhong Li, Tristan van Leeuwen, Daniel M. Pelt, K. Joost Batenburg