Energy-oriented Diffusion Bridge for Image Restoration with Foundational Diffusion Models

Fuente: arXiv
Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Hou, Jinhui, Zhu, Zhiyu, Hou, Junhui
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
Subjects:
Online Access:
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
_version_ 1866915933970235392
author Hou, Jinhui
Zhu, Zhiyu
Hou, Junhui
author_facet Hou, Jinhui
Zhu, Zhiyu
Hou, Junhui
contents Diffusion bridge models have shown great promise in image restoration by explicitly connecting clean and degraded image distributions. However, they often rely on complex and high-cost trajectories, which limit both sampling efficiency and final restoration quality. To address this, we propose an Energy-oriented diffusion Bridge (E-Bridge) framework to approximate a set of low-cost manifold geodesic trajectories to boost the performance of the proposed method. We achieve this by designing a novel bridge process that evolves over a shorter time horizon and makes the reverse process start from an entropy-regularized point that mixes the degraded image and Gaussian noise, which theoretically reduces the required trajectory energy. To solve this process efficiently, we draw inspiration from consistency models to learn a single-step mapping function, optimized via a continuous-time consistency objective tailored for our trajectory, so as to analytically map any state on the trajectory to the target image. Notably, the trajectory length in our framework becomes a tunable task-adaptive knob, allowing the model to adaptively balance information preservation against generative power for tasks of varying degradation, such as denoising versus super-resolution. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our E-Bridge achieves state-of-the-art performance across various image restoration tasks while enabling high-quality recovery with a single or fewer sampling steps. Our project page is https://jinnh.github.io/E-Bridge/.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2604_10983
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Energy-oriented Diffusion Bridge for Image Restoration with Foundational Diffusion Models
Hou, Jinhui
Zhu, Zhiyu
Hou, Junhui
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Diffusion bridge models have shown great promise in image restoration by explicitly connecting clean and degraded image distributions. However, they often rely on complex and high-cost trajectories, which limit both sampling efficiency and final restoration quality. To address this, we propose an Energy-oriented diffusion Bridge (E-Bridge) framework to approximate a set of low-cost manifold geodesic trajectories to boost the performance of the proposed method. We achieve this by designing a novel bridge process that evolves over a shorter time horizon and makes the reverse process start from an entropy-regularized point that mixes the degraded image and Gaussian noise, which theoretically reduces the required trajectory energy. To solve this process efficiently, we draw inspiration from consistency models to learn a single-step mapping function, optimized via a continuous-time consistency objective tailored for our trajectory, so as to analytically map any state on the trajectory to the target image. Notably, the trajectory length in our framework becomes a tunable task-adaptive knob, allowing the model to adaptively balance information preservation against generative power for tasks of varying degradation, such as denoising versus super-resolution. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our E-Bridge achieves state-of-the-art performance across various image restoration tasks while enabling high-quality recovery with a single or fewer sampling steps. Our project page is https://jinnh.github.io/E-Bridge/.
title Energy-oriented Diffusion Bridge for Image Restoration with Foundational Diffusion Models
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.10983