Restore-R1: Efficient Image Restoration Agents via Reinforcement Learning with Multimodal LLM Perceptual Feedback

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Lu, Jianglin, Wu, Yuanwei, Zhao, Ziyi, Wang, Hongcheng, Jimenez, Felix, Majeedi, Abrar, Fu, Yun
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Lu, Jianglin
Wu, Yuanwei
Zhao, Ziyi
Wang, Hongcheng
Jimenez, Felix
Majeedi, Abrar
Fu, Yun
author_facet Lu, Jianglin
Wu, Yuanwei
Zhao, Ziyi
Wang, Hongcheng
Jimenez, Felix
Majeedi, Abrar
Fu, Yun
contents Complex image restoration aims to recover high-quality images from inputs affected by multiple degradations such as blur, noise, rain, and compression artifacts. Recent restoration agents, powered by vision-language models and large language models, offer promising restoration capabilities but suffer from significant efficiency bottlenecks due to reflection, rollback, and iterative tool searching. Moreover, their performance heavily depends on degradation recognition models that require extensive annotations for training, limiting their applicability in label-free environments. To address these limitations, we propose a policy optimization-based restoration framework that learns an lightweight agent to determine tool-calling sequences. The agent operates in a sequential decision process, selecting the most appropriate restoration operation at each step to maximize final image quality. To enable training within label-free environments, we introduce a novel reward mechanism driven by multimodal large language models, which act as human-aligned evaluator and provide perceptual feedback for policy improvement. Once trained, our agent executes a deterministic restoration plans without redundant tool invocations, significantly accelerating inference while maintaining high restoration quality. Extensive experiments show that despite using no supervision, our method matches SOTA performance on full-reference metrics and surpasses existing approaches on no-reference metrics across diverse degradation scenarios.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2512_18599
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Restore-R1: Efficient Image Restoration Agents via Reinforcement Learning with Multimodal LLM Perceptual Feedback
Lu, Jianglin
Wu, Yuanwei
Zhao, Ziyi
Wang, Hongcheng
Jimenez, Felix
Majeedi, Abrar
Fu, Yun
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Complex image restoration aims to recover high-quality images from inputs affected by multiple degradations such as blur, noise, rain, and compression artifacts. Recent restoration agents, powered by vision-language models and large language models, offer promising restoration capabilities but suffer from significant efficiency bottlenecks due to reflection, rollback, and iterative tool searching. Moreover, their performance heavily depends on degradation recognition models that require extensive annotations for training, limiting their applicability in label-free environments. To address these limitations, we propose a policy optimization-based restoration framework that learns an lightweight agent to determine tool-calling sequences. The agent operates in a sequential decision process, selecting the most appropriate restoration operation at each step to maximize final image quality. To enable training within label-free environments, we introduce a novel reward mechanism driven by multimodal large language models, which act as human-aligned evaluator and provide perceptual feedback for policy improvement. Once trained, our agent executes a deterministic restoration plans without redundant tool invocations, significantly accelerating inference while maintaining high restoration quality. Extensive experiments show that despite using no supervision, our method matches SOTA performance on full-reference metrics and surpasses existing approaches on no-reference metrics across diverse degradation scenarios.
title Restore-R1: Efficient Image Restoration Agents via Reinforcement Learning with Multimodal LLM Perceptual Feedback
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.18599