RIRF: Reasoning Image Restoration Framework

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Main Authors: Yan, Wending, Zhang, Rongkai, Tang, Kaihua, Cheng, Yu, Liu, Qiankun
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
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author Yan, Wending
Zhang, Rongkai
Tang, Kaihua
Cheng, Yu
Liu, Qiankun
author_facet Yan, Wending
Zhang, Rongkai
Tang, Kaihua
Cheng, Yu
Liu, Qiankun
contents Universal image restoration (UIR) aims to recover clean images from diverse and unknown degradations using a unified model. Existing UIR methods primarily focus on pixel reconstruction and often lack explicit diagnostic reasoning over degradation composition, severity, and scene semantics prior to restoration. We propose Reason and Restore (R\&R), a novel framework that integrates structured Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning into the image restoration pipeline. R\&R introduces an explicit reasoner, implemented by fine-tuning Qwen3-VL, to diagnose degradation types, quantify degradation severity, infer key degradation-related factors, and describe relevant scene and object semantics. The resulting structured reasoning provides interpretable and fine-grained diagnostic priors for the restorer. To further improve restoration quality, the quantified degradation severity produced by the reasoner is leveraged as reinforcement learning (RL) signals to guide and strengthen the restorer. Unlike existing multimodal LLM-based agentic systems that decouple reasoning from low-level vision tasks, R\&R tightly couples semantic diagnostic reasoning with pixel-level restoration in a unified framework. Extensive experiments across diverse UIR benchmarks demonstrate that R\&R achieves state-of-the-art performance while offering unique interpretability into the restoration process.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2604_09511
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle RIRF: Reasoning Image Restoration Framework
Yan, Wending
Zhang, Rongkai
Tang, Kaihua
Cheng, Yu
Liu, Qiankun
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Universal image restoration (UIR) aims to recover clean images from diverse and unknown degradations using a unified model. Existing UIR methods primarily focus on pixel reconstruction and often lack explicit diagnostic reasoning over degradation composition, severity, and scene semantics prior to restoration. We propose Reason and Restore (R\&R), a novel framework that integrates structured Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning into the image restoration pipeline. R\&R introduces an explicit reasoner, implemented by fine-tuning Qwen3-VL, to diagnose degradation types, quantify degradation severity, infer key degradation-related factors, and describe relevant scene and object semantics. The resulting structured reasoning provides interpretable and fine-grained diagnostic priors for the restorer. To further improve restoration quality, the quantified degradation severity produced by the reasoner is leveraged as reinforcement learning (RL) signals to guide and strengthen the restorer. Unlike existing multimodal LLM-based agentic systems that decouple reasoning from low-level vision tasks, R\&R tightly couples semantic diagnostic reasoning with pixel-level restoration in a unified framework. Extensive experiments across diverse UIR benchmarks demonstrate that R\&R achieves state-of-the-art performance while offering unique interpretability into the restoration process.
title RIRF: Reasoning Image Restoration Framework
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.09511