CIVQLLIE: Causal Intervention with Vector Quantization for Low-Light Image Enhancement
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arXiv
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| Format: | Preprint |
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2025
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| _version_ | 1866912521219211264 |
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| author | Zhang, Tongshun Liu, Pingping Zhang, Zhe Zhou, Qiuzhan |
| author_facet | Zhang, Tongshun Liu, Pingping Zhang, Zhe Zhou, Qiuzhan |
| contents | Images captured in nighttime scenes suffer from severely reduced visibility, hindering effective content perception. Current low-light image enhancement (LLIE) methods face significant challenges: data-driven end-to-end mapping networks lack interpretability or rely on unreliable prior guidance, struggling under extremely dark conditions, while physics-based methods depend on simplified assumptions that often fail in complex real-world scenarios. To address these limitations, we propose CIVQLLIE, a novel framework that leverages the power of discrete representation learning through causal reasoning. We achieve this through Vector Quantization (VQ), which maps continuous image features to a discrete codebook of visual tokens learned from large-scale high-quality images. This codebook serves as a reliable prior, encoding standardized brightness and color patterns that are independent of degradation. However, direct application of VQ to low-light images fails due to distribution shifts between degraded inputs and the learned codebook. Therefore, we propose a multi-level causal intervention approach to systematically correct these shifts. First, during encoding, our Pixel-level Causal Intervention (PCI) module intervenes to align low-level features with the brightness and color distributions expected by the codebook. Second, a Feature-aware Causal Intervention (FCI) mechanism with Low-frequency Selective Attention Gating (LSAG) identifies and enhances channels most affected by illumination degradation, facilitating accurate codebook token matching while enhancing the encoder's generalization performance through flexible feature-level intervention. Finally, during decoding, the High-frequency Detail Reconstruction Module (HDRM) leverages structural information preserved in the matched codebook representations to reconstruct fine details using deformable convolution techniques. |
| format | Preprint |
| id |
arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2508_03338 |
| institution | arXiv |
| publishDate | 2025 |
| record_format | arxiv |
| spellingShingle | CIVQLLIE: Causal Intervention with Vector Quantization for Low-Light Image Enhancement Zhang, Tongshun Liu, Pingping Zhang, Zhe Zhou, Qiuzhan Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition Images captured in nighttime scenes suffer from severely reduced visibility, hindering effective content perception. Current low-light image enhancement (LLIE) methods face significant challenges: data-driven end-to-end mapping networks lack interpretability or rely on unreliable prior guidance, struggling under extremely dark conditions, while physics-based methods depend on simplified assumptions that often fail in complex real-world scenarios. To address these limitations, we propose CIVQLLIE, a novel framework that leverages the power of discrete representation learning through causal reasoning. We achieve this through Vector Quantization (VQ), which maps continuous image features to a discrete codebook of visual tokens learned from large-scale high-quality images. This codebook serves as a reliable prior, encoding standardized brightness and color patterns that are independent of degradation. However, direct application of VQ to low-light images fails due to distribution shifts between degraded inputs and the learned codebook. Therefore, we propose a multi-level causal intervention approach to systematically correct these shifts. First, during encoding, our Pixel-level Causal Intervention (PCI) module intervenes to align low-level features with the brightness and color distributions expected by the codebook. Second, a Feature-aware Causal Intervention (FCI) mechanism with Low-frequency Selective Attention Gating (LSAG) identifies and enhances channels most affected by illumination degradation, facilitating accurate codebook token matching while enhancing the encoder's generalization performance through flexible feature-level intervention. Finally, during decoding, the High-frequency Detail Reconstruction Module (HDRM) leverages structural information preserved in the matched codebook representations to reconstruct fine details using deformable convolution techniques. |
| title | CIVQLLIE: Causal Intervention with Vector Quantization for Low-Light Image Enhancement |
| topic | Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition |
| url | https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.03338 |