Lingchen Sun^$\star$1,2   Rongyuan Wu^$\star$1,2   Xiangtao Kong ^1,2   Jixin Zhao ²   Qiaosi Yi ^1,2   
Yujing Sun ^1,2   Shuaizheng Liu ^1,2   Zhengqiang Zhang ^1,2   Lei Zhang^$†$1,2

¹ The Hong Kong Polytechnic University ² OPPO Research Institute

^$\star$ Equal contribution.  ^$†$ Corresponding author (cslzhang@comp.polyu.edu.hk).

KEYWORDS : Image Restoration, Pixel Diffusion, Degradation-Aware, DINO

 1  Introduction

Image restoration (IR) [1, 2, 3] aims to recover a high-quality (HQ) image from its low-quality (LQ) counterpart corrupted by diverse and often co-occurring degradations such as noise, blur, rain, haze, and low light. Rather than training specialist models per degradation, many efforts have been devoted to pursuing unified image restoration (UIR), i.e., using a single model to handle a broad spectrum of image degradations [4]. Built on CNN- and Transformer-based backbones, conventional regression-based methods [5, 6, 7, 8, 9] are efficient and have made encouraging progress. However, their deterministic $L_1$/$L_2$ objectives and limited capacity tend to yield over-smoothed results and unremoved degradations.

Diffusion models have recently been applied to UIR [10, 8] to improve perceptual quality by leveraging their strong generative capacity. Most recent works finetune pretrained text-to-image (T2I) latent diffusion models, e.g., FoundIR-v2 [11] adapts SDXL [12] with MoE routing and an MLLM [13] captioner, and FLUX-IR [14] finetunes FLUX [15] with reinforced ODE trajectories and cost-aware distillation. T2I pretraining brings rich priors and perceptual realism, but at three costs: (1) Lossy latent bottleneck, as the VAE may discard image textures and details that restoration aims to preserve; (2) Objective mismatch, as T2I priors may synthesize visually plausible but inconsistent details with the input; and (3) Redundant computation, caused by the billion-scale backbones, MLLM planners, MoE routing, VAE coding, and iterative sampling. This motivates us to rethink the suitability of T2I models for UIR. Unlike T2I generation, which synthesizes an image from textual cues, UIR starts from LQ images, which contain rich visual cues. Therefore, UIR requires less open-ended generative capacity than T2I models, but it demands robustness to different degradations and faithful reconstruction of pixel-aligned details.

Motivated by the above observations, we present PixRestore, a VAE-free pixel diffusion transformer (DiT) [16, 17] for UIR. The diffusion backbone is trained from scratch without T2I pretraining. By applying flow matching directly to patchified pixels, PixRestore preserves pixel-aligned evidence while keeping the token sequence tractable. Our method removes the autoencoder overhead and substantially improves content fidelity while maintaining strong perceptual quality. Unlike task-specific IR, UIR must handle diverse and compounded degradations, making a static global degradation representation insufficient. We therefore exploit hierarchical features from the self-supervised visual foundation model DINO [18] to provide adaptive guidance for restoration. Our analysis reveals two properties of DINO features: the layers carry complementary cues, from shallow structures to deep semantics, and their reliability varies across degradation types. Accordingly, we train an adaptive layer router to predict per-layer weights from the LQ input, using LQ–HQ DINO feature similarity as supervision during training. The predicted weights fuse features from more reliable layers into dense conditioning, while less reliable layers receive stronger supervision from the corresponding HQ features.

Finally, to speed up PixRestore at inference time, we first train a multi-step PixRestore model on a large-scale corpus of diverse scenes and degradations, then finetune it into a single-step generator with DINO-based adversarial objectives. Fig. 1 compares PixRestore against existing diffusion-based UIR methods in terms of restoration quality, model size, and inference latency. With only about 50M parameters and single-step inference, PixRestore attains the best quality while being the fastest (about 44 ms) and most compact model among the diffusion-based methods. In addition, our experiments show that larger PixRestore variants can further improve restoration quality, confirming the scalability of our design.

• We propose PixRestore, a pixel-space DiT for UIR. Working on patchified pixels, PixRestore is free of the VAE and T2I priors, improving image fidelity, perceptual quality, and model efficiency.

• We introduce adaptive hierarchical visual guidance, providing dense conditioning to guide restoration and supervision to stabilize training under various degradations.

• We finetune the multi-step model into a single-step generator via DINO-based adversarial objectives, achieving efficient inference with little quality loss.

• Extensive experiments show that PixRestore achieves superior fidelity, perceptual quality, and robustness on public benchmarks and real-world test sets.

 2  Related Work

Regression-based Unified Restoration. Conventional IR methods are typically developed for a specific degradation, such as noise [1], blur [3], rain [19], haze [2], etc. UIR instead seeks a single model for multiple degradations. Existing UIR methods improve degradation adaptivity with learned degradation representations [5], prompts [6], or expert routing [20], etc. Methods such as PromptIR [6], AirNet [5], and their successors show that degradation-aware modulation can substantially improve multi-task compatibility. However, these models are usually optimized as deterministic LQ-to-HQ regressors with $L_1$/$L_2$ losses, which favor conditional averages, often suppressing high-frequency details and limiting perceptual realism. Their task-level prompts or routing decisions may also generalize poorly to more complex real-world degradations. We instead model restoration as a conditional pixel-space flow and derive dense, per-image guidance from hierarchical DINO features.

Generative Unified Restoration. Generative UIR methods synthesize HQ images conditioned on LQ inputs. One line of research learns the conditional generative process from scratch within the restoration task, keeping the model restoration-native [21, 10]. For example, DiffUIR [10] and DA-CLIP [8] design restoration-specific diffusion pipelines or degradation-aware conditioning to improve fidelity across different degradations. Another line adapts pretrained T2I latent diffusion models with degradation predictors [22], multimodal prompts [23], or routing mechanisms [11]. These methods benefit from strong generative priors, but suffer from the conflict between open-ended image synthesis and faithful restoration. In addition, the VAE compresses the input image before diffusion, removing restoration-sensitive details such as small structures, text strokes, and sharp edges. Large T2I backbones and auxiliary planners or expert modules further increase computational cost. In contrast, our proposed PixRestore operates in a patchified pixel space and uses a scalable transformer with layer-adaptive visual conditioning for efficient and faithful UIR.

Pixel Generative Modeling. Diffusion is originally formulated in pixel space, whereas latent diffusion becomes dominant for the reduced generation costs [24]. Recent work has revisited VAE-free generation using improved DiT architectures [17] and loss functions [25]. For UIR, the LQ image provides dense spatial correspondence to the desired output, but compressing it using a VAE can destroy useful information for restoration. Pixel-space modeling preserves that evidence, but introduces computational challenges due to the long spatial sequence. We address this trade-off by using patchification. Different from previous pixel generators developed for text-conditioned synthesis, PixRestore combines pixel-space flow modeling with degradation-aware hierarchical DINO guidance for unified restoration.

 3  Method

Let $y_{hq}\in {\left[-1,1\right]}^{3\times H\times W}$ be an HQ image and $y_{lq}$ its LQ counterpart corrupted by degradations such as noise, blur, haze, rain, or low light. UIR aims to learn a single model that maps $y_{lq}$ to an estimate ${\hat{y}}_{hq}$, without any task-specific expert. We formulate UIR as a conditional flow matching problem in pixel space and present PixRestore, whose network framework is shown in Fig. 2. A VAE-free pixel DiT learns the conditional flow directly on RGB pixels, avoiding the lossy compression of a latent autoencoder (Sec. 3.1). To capture both degradation and semantic cues, we use a vision encoder to extract multi-layer dense features from the LQ image, and use an adaptive layer router to predict per-layer weights $p_l$. These weights fuse the features into a single representation, which is injected into the DiT blocks by cross-attention. In addition, the predicted weights enable hierarchical visual supervision, detailed in Sec. 3.2. Finally, for efficient inference, we finetune a single-step generator from the multi-step model via DINO-based adversarial objectives [26] (Sec. 3.3).

3.1  Pixel-space Restoration Diffusion Model

Instead of encoding images into a compressed latent space [23], PixRestore operates directly on RGB pixels. Given the HQ target $y_{hq}$, we adopt the linear interpolation path $x_t=\left(1-t\right)y_{hq}+tϵ$ with $ϵ\sim 𝒩(0,I)$ and $t\sim 𝒰(0,1)$. The restoration DiT $f_{\theta }$ predicts the clean image as:

${\hat{y}}_{hq}=f_{\theta }(\left[y_{lq};x_t\right],t,ℱ\left(y_{lq}\right)),$

(1)

where $\left[\cdot ;\cdot \right]$ denotes channel-wise concatenation and $ℱ\left(y_{lq}\right)$ denotes the multi-layer DINO features of the LQ input. Following JiT [17], the flow-matching objective is defined on the velocity. Therefore, we recover the velocity from the output by $v_t=\left(x_t-y_{hq}\right)/t$ and ${\hat{v}}_t=\left(x_t-{\hat{y}}_{hq}\right)/t$. To prevent division-by-zero as $t\to 0$, we clip the denominator of $1/t$ (by default, at $0.05$) during computation. The flow matching loss is ${ℒ}_{\mathrm{flow}}={\Vert {\hat{v}}_t-v_t\Vert }_2^2$.

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Model	VAE	Params(M)	Inf Time-DM (ms/step)	Inf Time-VAE (ms)	PSNR (dB) $\uparrow$	LPIPS $\downarrow$	MUSIQ $\uparrow$
Latent DiT-S	SD2VAE (f8c4, ps1)	106.41	25	78	22.10	0.2483	50.38
Latent DiT-S	FluxVAE (f8c16, ps1)	106.59	25	78	22.63	0.2109	50.86
Latent DiT-S	QwenVAE (f8c16, ps1)	67.37	25	41	22.80	0.2181	51.87
Pixel DiT-S	None (ps8)	23.41	25	0	26.62	0.1593	54.32

The concatenated input $[y_{lq};x_t]$ has six channels. A patch embedding partitions the full-resolution pixel grid into tokens, shown in Fig. 2. In this way, a relatively large patch size keeps the token sequence tractable without a VAE. Each DiT block consists of RMSNorm, QK-normalized attention, and rotary positional embeddings [27]. A single shared timestep block produces AdaLN modulation parameters for all Transformer blocks [28]. Multi-layer DINO features are injected via cross-attention in each block. During inference, the model integrates the predicted velocity from Gaussian noise using an Euler solver.

The overall training objective combines the flow loss with two auxiliary terms from the DINO module:

$ℒ={ℒ}_{\mathrm{flow}}+{\lambda }_{\mathrm{wpred}}{ℒ}_{\mathrm{wpred}}+{\lambda }_{\mathrm{feat}}{ℒ}_{\mathrm{feat}},$

(2)

where ${ℒ}_{\mathrm{wpred}}$ supervises the adaptive layer router and ${ℒ}_{\mathrm{feat}}$ enforces hierarchical feature fidelity. The two losses will be discussed and defined in Sec. 3.2.

Pixel Space vs. Latent Space. Latent DiTs use a VAE to reduce computational complexity before diffusion, but this compression can sacrifice small structures and fine textures. Pixel DiT instead operates on RGB pixels and keeps their spatial structure through patchification, better matching IR tasks, where the output must stay faithful to the input. To verify this, we compare the same DiT-S in the pixel space against latent space built on three widely used VAEs, i.e., SD2VAE [24], FluxVAE [15] and QwenVAE [29], under identical training and test settings, including training data, resolution, diffusion architecture, optimizer, and sampler. The pixel DiT model uses a patch size of 8 to match the latent resolution.

As shown in Table 1, pixel DiT beats all latent DiTs across all metrics (26.62 dB PSNR, 0.1593 LPIPS, 54.32 MUSIQ), significantly outperforming the best baseline with QwenVAE. Removing the VAE also reduces cost and latency (41–78 ms). Using only 23.41M parameters without VAE, our pixel DiT design reproduces more faithful image details, indicating that pixel-space modeling can better match the requirements of UIR. Detailed training and test settings, as well as per-degradation analysis, are provided in the Appendix.

3.2  Adaptive Hierarchical Visual Guidance

Visual Foundation Prior. To handle different types of degradations in the input LQ image, we introduce a frozen vision foundation encoder to provide dense visual cues for UIR. Specifically, we adopt DINOv2 [18] for this purpose because its self-distillation pretraining can produce dense, spatially precise tokens that preserve fine structure and texture while being semantically discriminative. We validate this choice with an experimental comparison against other encoders (CLIP [30], MAE [31], SigLIP [32], DINOv2 [18]) under the same pixel DiT setting, where DINOv2 performs the best on almost all metrics. The experiment details are in the Appendix.

Similarity-Guided Adaptive Layer Router. As illustrated in Fig. 3 (left), different DINO layers carry complementary visual cues: shallow layers ($l_1$–$l_2$) preserve local structures such as edges and textures for detailed reconstruction, while deeper layers ($l_8$–$l_{10}$) encode global semantics for degradation and content discrimination. Layer sensitivity is also degradation-dependent. As shown in Fig. 3 (right), which presents the LQ-HQ feature similarity, no single layer is sensitive to all degradations. In particular, shallow layers are sensitive to rain, blur, and snow degradations; deeper layers are sensitive to noise; and middle layers are sensitive to low-light, SR, and haze. Using a fixed layer or a uniform average over layers is thus suboptimal. We therefore train a lightweight module to predict per-image layer weights, supervised by paired LQ-HQ similarity.

For each layer $l$, we measure how much the LQ features retain the HQ content by averaging a cosine similarity and a normalized $L_2$-distance similarity over the projected LQ and HQ patch tokens: $s_l=\frac{1}{2}\left(s_l^{\cos }+s_l^{\mathrm{dist}}\right)$. A larger $s_l$ means that layer $l$ is more reliable under the observed degradation, so it should have a larger weight:

$q_l=\frac{\exp \left(s_l\right)}{{\sum }_{k\in ℒ}\exp \left(s_k\right)}.$

(3)

Computing $q_l$ requires the HQ image, which is unavailable at inference time. Thus, we train a lightweight predictor ${\rho }_{\psi }$ to estimate the weights from the LQ image and features: $p_l=\mathrm{softmax}\left({\rho }_{\psi }\left(\left[y_{lq},U_l\right]\right)\right),l\in ℒ$, where $U_l$ denotes the projected LQ features of different DINO layers. The cross-entropy loss is used to supervise the training:

$ℒ{}_{\mathrm{wpred}}=-\sum {}_{l\in ℒ}q{}_l\log p{}_l.$

(4)

The predictor thus learns which DINO layers are more reliable for each input, instead of relying on a uniform mixture.

Adaptive Conditioning and Hierarchical Supervision. The projected LQ features are fused using the predicted weights as follows:

$U_{\mathrm{fuse}}=\sum _{l\in ℒ}{p}_l{U}_l,$

(5)

which are then injected into each DiT block via cross-attention, with image tokens as queries and $U_{\mathrm{fuse}}$ as keys and values. To emphasize layers where the LQ features differ most from the HQ features, we further introduce a hierarchical feature supervision loss:

${ℒ}_{\mathrm{feat}}=\sum _{l\in ℒ}{r}_l{\ell }_l^{\mathrm{feat}},r_l=\frac{\exp \left(\left(1-s_l\right)\right)}{{\sum }_{k\in ℒ}\exp \left(\left(1-s_k\right)\right)},$

(6)

where ${\ell }_l^{\mathrm{feat}}$ is the cosine similarity loss between the HQ features and the restored-output features at layer $l$. The weights $q_l$ (see Eq.  (3)) and $r_l$ are complementary, i.e., $q_l$ selects reliable content features for conditioning, while $r_l$ focuses supervision on layers that need stronger restoration. With ${ℒ}_{\mathrm{wpred}}$ and ${ℒ}_{\mathrm{feat}}$ defined above, the complete multi-step objective is given by Eq. (2), where both auxiliary weights are set to $0.5$, and all layer features are channel-wise RMS normalized before projection.

3.3  Single-step Finetuning

The multi-step PixRestore model requires iterative sampling. We therefore finetune it into a single-step generator for efficient UIR. We initialize the student from the pretrained multi-step teacher and fix the flow time to $t=1$ so that the generator can predict the clean image in one forward pass from pure Gaussian noise $ϵ$, i.e., ${\hat{y}}_{hq}=f_{\theta }(\left[y_{lq};ϵ\right],t=1,ℱ\left(y_{lq}\right))$.

Since one-step generation may lose fine textures, we add a DINO-based adversarial objective. Reusing the same frozen encoder and layers, a lightweight multi-layer discriminator $D$ distinguishes the restored features $ℱ\left({\hat{y}}_{hq}\right)$ from the HQ features $ℱ\left(y_{hq}\right)$ with an independent head per layer. The discriminator is trained with the standard binary cross-entropy loss to classify $F_l^{y_{hq}}$ as real and $F_l^{{\hat{y}}_{hq}}$ as fake:

${ℒ}_D=\frac{1}{\left|ℒ\right|}\sum _{l\in ℒ}\left[{\ell }_{\mathrm{bce}}(D_l\left(F_l^{y_{hq}}\right),1)+{\ell }_{\mathrm{bce}}(D_l\left(F_l^{{\hat{y}}_{hq}}\right),0)\right].$

(7)

The generator is optimized to fool $D$:

${ℒ}_{\mathrm{adv}}=\frac{1}{\left|ℒ\right|}\sum _{l\in ℒ}{\ell }_{\mathrm{bce}}(D_l\left(F_l^{{\hat{y}}_{hq}}\right),1).$

(8)

The generator and discriminator are updated alternately. With $t=1$, the single-step objective is:

$ℒ={ℒ}_{\mathrm{flow}}+{\lambda }_{\mathrm{wpred}}{ℒ}_{\mathrm{wpred}}+{\lambda }_{\mathrm{feat}}{ℒ}_{\mathrm{feat}}+{\lambda }_{\mathrm{adv}}{ℒ}_{\mathrm{adv}},$

(9)

where all auxiliary weights are set to $0.5$. Operating on frozen DINO tokens rather than raw pixels, the discriminator shares the conditioning prior and adds little overhead. During inference, PixRestore restores an image from one noise sample with the LQ condition in a single step.

 4  Experiments

4.1  Experimental Setup

Training and Test Datasets. We build a training corpus of about 2.83M images covering eight restoration tasks (deblur, dehaze, denoise, de-rainstreak, de-raindrop, desnow, low-light enhancement, and super-resolution (SR)), with samples drawn with equal probability during training.

We evaluate PixRestore under two complementary settings. The first uses public benchmarks with paired GT for fidelity and perceptual evaluation: GoPro [33] and UHD-blur [3] (deblur), RESIDE-6K [2] and UHD-Haze [3] (dehaze), DIV2K [34] (Gaussian noise) and PolyU [35] (denoise), RainDS-real [36] and RealRain-1k [37] (de-rainstreak), RainDS-real [36] and UAV-Rain1k [38] (de-raindrop), UHD-LL [39] and LOLdataset [40] (low-light), WeatherBench [41] (desnow), and RealSR [42] and ScreenSR [43] (SR), all center-cropped to 512 for testing. The second is a real-world test set without GT, with 100 LQ images per degradation (deblur, dehaze, de-rainstreak, de-raindrop, desnow, low-light) from diverse sources [44, 45, 46]. Detailed training and testing data are given in the Appendix.

Compared Methods. We compare with representative UIR methods, including the regression-based PromptIR [6] and diffusion-based DA-CLIP [8], DiffUIR [10], FoundIR [9], FoundIR-v2 [11], UniRestore [47], Flux-IR [14] and FAPE-IR [23]. For fair comparison and to isolate the effect of training data, we evaluate both the official checkpoints and retrained versions of the major baselines on our dataset.

PixRestore Model Settings. PixRestore adopts LightningDiT [27] as the DiT backbone and DINOv2 [18] as the vision encoder. Each Transformer block follows the LightningDiT design and contains a multi-head self-attention module, a cross-attention module, and a feed-forward network. A single shared timestep block produces AdaLN modulation parameters for all Transformer blocks [28]. We provide four variants of the model with different backbone sizes. All variants use a patch size of 8 in pixel patchification. During training, the DINOv2 model is frozen and only the diffusion model is trained. Unless otherwise specified, “PixRestore” refers to the PixRestore-S variant in the paper.

• PixRestore-S uses a LightningDiT-S backbone with a hidden dimension of 384. It contains 12 Transformer blocks, each with 6 attention heads. DINOv2-S is used as the vision encoder.

• PixRestore-B uses a LightningDiT-B backbone with a hidden dimension of 768. It contains 12 Transformer blocks, each with 12 attention heads. DINOv2-B is used as the vision encoder.

• PixRestore-L uses a LightningDiT-L backbone with a hidden dimension of 1024. It contains 24 Transformer blocks, each with 16 attention heads. DINOv2-L is used as the vision encoder.

• PixRestore-XL uses a LightningDiT-XL backbone with a hidden dimension of 1152. It contains 28 Transformer blocks, each with 16 attention heads. Since DINOv2 does not provide an XL version, we use DINOv2-L as the vision encoder.

Training Details. We train the multi-step model for 250K iterations, and then finetune it into a one-step model for an additional 100K iterations, using AdamW with a learning rate of $1\times {10}^{-4}$ and a batch size of 16 on $512\times 512$ image crops across 8 NVIDIA A800 GPUs. DINO features are extracted from six layers evenly distributed throughout the encoder.

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Method	De-rainstreak					Denoise					Deblur					De-raindrop
	PSNR	SSIM	LPIPS	DISTS	DR-Score	PSNR	SSIM	LPIPS	DISTS	DR-Score	PSNR	SSIM	LPIPS	DISTS	DR-Score	PSNR	SSIM	LPIPS	DISTS	DR-Score
PromptIR	24.50	0.7507	0.3529	0.2381	31.25	32.54	0.9029	0.2459	0.1604	55.35	23.82	0.7584	0.3131	0.2195	27.23	18.81	0.6962	0.3390	0.1885	24.86
PromptIR∗	28.43	0.8389	0.2659	0.1904	49.99	35.45	0.9377	0.1104	0.1065	79.33	29.10	0.8474	0.2051	0.1560	55.56	23.68	0.8005	0.2236	0.1326	51.74
DiffUIR	24.51	0.7618	0.3484	0.2248	40.13	26.61	0.8380	0.3103	0.2056	59.52	27.86	0.8200	0.2258	0.1699	44.09	18.85	0.7004	0.3455	0.1905	26.50
UniRestore	22.50	0.7291	0.4223	0.2689	34.31	31.75	0.8969	0.2336	0.1669	61.20	23.87	0.7205	0.2405	0.1716	46.94	18.50	0.6377	0.4114	0.2285	27.90
DA-CLIP	24.50	0.7560	0.3347	0.2176	43.09	27.35	0.8245	0.2459	0.1764	64.12	27.40	0.8113	0.1641	0.1303	55.00	20.12	0.6988	0.2715	0.1512	55.20
DA-CLIP∗	31.61	0.8606	0.1048	0.0885	78.72	33.97	0.8728	0.1462	0.1166	75.14	28.29	0.8228	0.1474	0.1148	58.38	23.58	0.7916	0.1325	0.0852	79.64
FoundIR	26.87	0.8263	0.2454	0.1799	52.37	32.46	0.7925	0.2794	0.1641	55.52	27.29	0.8046	0.2430	0.1781	39.12	18.87	0.6972	0.3586	0.2017	26.21
FoundIR∗	32.36	0.8888	0.1593	0.1203	71.12	36.16	0.9415	0.1051	0.1245	80.86	29.14	0.8466	0.1986	0.1503	49.86	24.40	0.8218	0.1942	0.1146	65.00
Flux-IR	20.98	0.6233	0.4625	0.2861	26.04	25.71	0.6842	0.4197	0.2367	54.86	23.51	0.6745	0.2746	0.1851	58.70	18.94	0.6459	0.3224	0.1774	39.72
Flux-IR∗	21.01	0.6344	0.4511	0.2822	31.04	26.80	0.7410	0.3789	0.2051	37.05	22.15	0.6446	0.2818	0.2036	73.18	17.80	0.5785	0.3266	0.2075	71.26
FoundIR-v2	23.17	0.6652	0.3659	0.2218	57.26	26.87	0.7481	0.2785	0.1946	74.47	24.40	0.7079	0.2203	0.1566	73.23	19.63	0.5459	0.2792	0.1563	55.48
FoundIR-v2∗	27.85	0.7598	0.1773	0.1322	81.03	28.17	0.7497	0.2889	0.1890	75.01	24.98	0.7351	0.1914	0.1323	77.12	20.81	0.5461	0.2300	0.1294	80.28
FAPE-IR	27.51	0.8226	0.2319	0.1679	71.09	32.99	0.9088	0.1238	0.1113	79.31	26.80	0.7895	0.2098	0.1556	50.72	21.39	0.6822	0.2219	0.1316	71.77
FAPE-IR∗	31.91	0.8695	0.0903	0.0762	84.64	34.22	0.9172	0.0741	0.0750	82.56	27.96	0.8207	0.1577	0.1094	66.75	23.88	0.7223	0.1555	0.0967	81.91
PixRestore	32.28	0.8847	0.0902	0.0905	82.75	34.87	0.9336	0.0624	0.0735	81.89	28.32	0.8284	0.1201	0.0940	70.19	24.48	0.7755	0.1258	0.0882	82.20
PixRestore-B	32.85	0.8898	0.0767	0.0817	84.72	34.62	0.9356	0.0564	0.0706	83.70	29.23	0.8511	0.1051	0.0835	72.69	25.21	0.7976	0.1087	0.0763	84.77
Method	Desnow					Dehaze					Low-light enhancement					Super-resolution
	PSNR	SSIM	LPIPS	DISTS	DR-Score	PSNR	SSIM	LPIPS	DISTS	DR-Score	PSNR	SSIM	LPIPS	DISTS	DR-Score	PSNR	SSIM	LPIPS	DISTS	DR-Score
PromptIR	22.26	0.7939	0.2452	0.1672	24.35	21.34	0.8803	0.1426	0.1012	61.68	10.49	0.4781	0.5410	0.3765	27.87	24.26	0.7372	0.4394	0.2510	33.48
PromptIR∗	29.32	0.8532	0.1818	0.1402	72.39	21.25	0.8931	0.1348	0.0885	67.89	17.91	0.6881	0.3564	0.2512	58.58	27.59	0.7968	0.2839	0.2208	55.70
DiffUIR	22.95	0.7948	0.2392	0.1667	25.00	20.41	0.8656	0.1640	0.1175	57.19	21.72	0.7082	0.3819	0.2292	62.93	26.54	0.7582	0.3866	0.2378	45.81
UniRestore	22.33	0.7863	0.2464	0.1771	26.12	20.11	0.8469	0.2122	0.1359	67.33	10.94	0.5188	0.5006	0.3165	38.38	24.80	0.7543	0.3548	0.2284	60.49
DA-CLIP	23.60	0.7971	0.2221	0.1558	35.53	22.96	0.8751	0.1311	0.0885	70.33	22.25	0.7915	0.2469	0.1622	73.29	23.73	0.6789	0.3772	0.2367	46.43
DA-CLIP∗	28.31	0.8282	0.1360	0.1021	81.48	21.92	0.8779	0.1459	0.1077	58.58	18.01	0.8185	0.2129	0.1614	72.79	26.49	0.7585	0.2341	0.1763	65.25
FoundIR	23.03	0.7999	0.2406	0.1630	24.68	15.07	0.7901	0.2582	0.1919	33.17	15.34	0.7473	0.3034	0.2132	62.24	25.85	0.7399	0.4280	0.2492	29.70
FoundIR∗	29.82	0.8678	0.1524	0.1224	73.00	20.99	0.8903	0.1335	0.0962	64.81	23.34	0.9026	0.1792	0.1439	80.41	27.65	0.7952	0.2883	0.2251	64.69
Flux-IR	21.74	0.7231	0.3434	0.2204	26.80	14.73	0.7599	0.2976	0.1986	46.13	18.85	0.7022	0.3557	0.1998	62.16	22.49	0.6541	0.2903	0.2064	77.19
Flux-IR∗	21.79	0.6831	0.3023	0.1959	51.21	15.96	0.8061	0.2315	0.1578	52.88	18.40	0.7198	0.3386	0.2010	61.45	20.87	0.5853	0.3569	0.2519	74.89
FoundIR-v2	24.72	0.7347	0.2513	0.1671	67.47	19.06	0.7705	0.1928	0.1337	62.79	17.17	0.7448	0.3132	0.2027	72.49	23.85	0.6661	0.2959	0.1974	76.25
FoundIR-v2∗	26.28	0.7690	0.1824	0.1311	82.52	19.10	0.7645	0.1933	0.1282	63.22	17.04	0.7307	0.3188	0.2101	68.16	23.79	0.6530	0.2493	0.1682	78.87
FAPE-IR	26.02	0.8191	0.1759	0.1189	60.36	25.28	0.9007	0.0960	0.0650	75.76	19.46	0.7629	0.2580	0.1838	58.29	26.55	0.7732	0.2816	0.1977	68.92
FAPE-IR∗	30.19	0.8676	0.1136	0.0849	83.66	25.34	0.9056	0.0927	0.0645	76.59	26.04	0.9014	0.1370	0.1068	82.00	27.48	0.7843	0.1952	0.1433	77.81
PixRestore	31.26	0.8859	0.0853	0.0669	84.22	25.46	0.9142	0.0896	0.0650	74.86	25.62	0.8894	0.1360	0.1008	81.58	27.01	0.7730	0.1736	0.1358	77.53
PixRestore-B	31.93	0.8959	0.0688	0.0584	84.51	26.64	0.9228	0.0789	0.0574	76.60	25.72	0.8935	0.1298	0.0955	83.08	27.07	0.7773	0.1601	0.1289	77.88

Evaluation. We assess fidelity with PSNR and SSIM [48] and perceptual quality with LPIPS [49] and DISTS [50]. Degradation removal is a key indicator for UIR, reflecting whether a method truly eliminates the target degradation, especially in real-world cases where only no-reference (NR) metrics apply. However, existing NR metrics (e.g., MUSIQ [51] and AFINE-NR [52]) do not measure it well. As shown in Fig. 4, PixRestore removes rainstreaks most effectively but scores the worst on MUSIQ and AFINE-NR, which favor the LQ input and the degradation-preserving output of FoundIR-v2. We therefore propose DR-Score as an auxiliary diagnostic metric. It uses a vision-language model (VLM, e.g., Gemini-3.1 Pro [53]) to judge whether the target degradation has been removed. Because VLM outputs can be stochastic, we test each image five times and report the average score. In the Appendix, we detail the prompt design of DR-Score, and demonstrate its strong alignment with human perceptual judgments.

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Method	NFE	Params (M)	FLOPs (G)	Latency (ms)
PromptIR	-	35.59	1382	334
DiffUIR	4	36.26	3839	777
DA-CLIP	100	231.76	112927	18071
FoundIR	4	36.26	3839	777
UniRestore	1	1071.20	5255	158
FoundIR-v2	20	16910.09	119334	18293
Flux-IR	21	17698.23	795290	5790
FAPE-IR	1	21575.43	64758	1011
PixRestore	1	53.70	658	44
PixRestore-B	1	210.89	1842	79

4.2  Public Benchmark Results

Table 2 compares the competing methods on eight tasks. First, we can see that most of the models retrained on our dataset improve over their original counterparts, showing the effectiveness of our training data, which consist of more samples with diverse content. Second, the two variants of PixRestore show the best overall performance, with its variants ranking first or second on most metrics including reference-based metrics and DR-Score. The results also expose clear differences among methods. The regression model PromptIR remains competitive on denoise, but its performance drops on deblur, rain, haze, low-light, and SR, where the information is lost more severely. Restoration-native diffusion models (DiffUIR, DA-CLIP, FoundIR) generally improve perceptual quality and degradation removal on several tasks. DA-CLIP is relatively strong on de-rainstreak, de-raindrop, and desnow, while FoundIR performs better on dehaze and denoise. This suggests that such models benefit from generative modeling, but their performance varies noticeably across degradations.

Pretrained latent T2I methods show a different trade-off. The SDXL-based FoundIR-v2 attains high DR-Scores but lower fidelity and perceptual performance, which is consistent with the input-detail loss introduced by latent VAE compression. FLUX-based FAPE-IR is among the strongest methods on several degradations (e.g., de-rainstreak and denoise), whereas Flux-IR shows much less consistent performance. This suggests that a stronger generative prior alone does not guarantee better UIR performance. FAPE-IR requires a complex auxiliary design (e.g., Qwen2-VL [54] and SigLIP in FAPE-IR) to adapt the T2I prior to UIR, as reflected by its substantially large parameter count.

PixRestore is more closely aligned with the restoration objective. Flow matching on patchified pixels preserves spatial evidence that a VAE may weaken, while the hierarchical DINO guidance adapts the conditioning to each degradation rather than relying on a single global prior. Fig. 5 shows visual comparisons. On the desnow and low-light enhancement benchmarks, competing methods often leave residual degradations or recover less faithful details, whereas PixRestore removes the degradations more thoroughly and preserves sharper structures. These gains are achieved with substantially lower inference cost, as shown in Table 3.

4.3  Model Complexity Comparisons

Table 3 compares model size, computation, and latency under the same resolution and hardware. With only 53.7M parameters (including the frozen DINO encoder), 658G FLOPs, and 44 ms per image, PixRestore is much lighter than other UIR models, running about 7–23$\times$ faster than PromptIR, DiffUIR, FoundIR, and FAPE-IR. Its computation is only about 1/181 of FoundIR-v2 and 1/1209 of Flux-IR. In addition, PixRestore-B further improves UIR performance while still keeping the model compact and efficient, with 210.89M parameters, 1842G FLOPs, and 79 ms latency. Our results suggest that strong UIR models may not require a lossy latent VAE or a massive T2I prior.

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ID	Variant	NFE	Conditioning	Supervision	PSNR$\uparrow$	SSIM$\uparrow$	LPIPS$\downarrow$	MUSIQ$\uparrow$
A0	Pixel DiT-S	10	None	None	26.62	0.8454	0.1593	54.32
A1	+ single-layer conditioning	10	layer 2	None	27.07	0.8457	0.1561	54.45
A2	+ single-layer conditioning	10	layer 5	None	27.36	0.8487	0.1489	54.64
A3	+ single-layer conditioning	10	layer 11	None	27.12	0.8491	0.1508	54.60
A4	+ multi-layer conditioning	10	Avg. 2 layers	None	27.62	0.8540	0.1412	54.90
A5	+ multi-layer conditioning	10	Avg. 6 layers	None	27.72	0.8536	0.1407	55.01
A6	+ hierarchical loss	10	Avg. 6 layers	Avg. 6 layers	27.36	0.8444	0.1239	54.59
A7	+ adaptive hierarchical visual guidance	10	Adap. 6 layers	Adap. 6 layers	27.66	0.8500	0.1209	54.97
A8	+ adaptive hierarchical visual guidance	4	Adap. 6 layers	Adap. 6 layers	27.75	0.8584	0.1228	54.07
A9	+ adaptive hierarchical visual guidance	1	Adap. 6 layers	Adap. 6 layers	28.07	0.8640	0.1202	53.34
A10	+ single-step finetuning (PixRestore)	1	Adap. 6 layers	Adap. 6 layers	28.49	0.8589	0.1120	55.52

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Scheme	Training iterations	PSNR$\uparrow$	SSIM$\uparrow$	LPIPS$\downarrow$	MUSIQ$\uparrow$
Regression Training	350k	27.00	0.8179	0.1494	52.00
Flow pretraining + one-step finetuning (ours)	250k + 100k	28.49	0.8589	0.1120	55.52

4.4  Ablation Studies

We conduct ablations to verify the main designs of PixRestore. The results are reported in Table 4 and Table 5, which are averaged over 15 public benchmarks covering 8 degradation types. All variants use LightningDiT-S in the pixel space as the baseline.

Effect of DINO Conditioning. Starting from the plain Pixel DiT-S baseline (A0), adding a single DINO feature consistently improves all metrics. The best single-layer choice is layer 5 (A2), which improves PSNR from 26.62 to 27.36, SSIM from 0.8454 to 0.8487, LPIPS from 0.1593 to 0.1489, and MUSIQ from 54.32 to 54.64. This shows that DINO features provide effective guidance for UIR.

Single-layer or Multi-layer Guidance. Using multiple DINO layers is better than using one fixed layer. Compared with the best single-layer setting A2, averaging 2 layers (A4) improves PSNR from 27.36 to 27.62 and LPIPS from 0.1489 to 0.1412. Averaging 6 layers (A5) further raises PSNR to 27.72 and MUSIQ to 55.01. This shows that shallow and deep DINO layers provide complementary cues for UIR.

Effect of Hierarchical Supervision. After introducing the hierarchical feature loss, LPIPS improves clearly from 0.1407 (A5) to 0.1239 (A6), showing better perceptual restoration. However, PSNR drops from 27.72 to 27.36 and SSIM drops from 0.8536 to 0.8444. This suggests that uniform feature-space supervision helps recover more realistic details, but does not give the best overall balance.

Adaptive Hierarchical Visual Guidance. We further compare A6 and A7. Both of them use multi-layer conditioning and supervision, but A6 uses uniform averaging while A7 uses adaptive layer weighting. A7 improves PSNR from 27.36 to 27.66, SSIM from 0.8444 to 0.8500, MUSIQ from 54.59 to 54.97, and LPIPS from 0.1239 to 0.1209. This shows that adaptive guidance better exploits the degradation-dependent reliability of DINO layers.

Different NFE. We further study the effect of reducing the number of function evaluations (NFE). Compared with A7 which uses 10 NFE, A8 with 4 NFE improves PSNR from 27.66 to 27.75 and SSIM from 0.8500 to 0.8584, while LPIPS changes from 0.1209 to 0.1228. When NFE is further reduced to 1, A9 still improves PSNR to 28.07 and SSIM to 0.8640, with LPIPS of 0.1202. MUSIQ drops from 54.97 to 54.07 and 53.34, but the overall results remain competitive. Interestingly, reducing NFE slightly improves PSNR/SSIM in our setting, possibly because fewer Euler updates reduce the accumulation of integration errors and over-smoothing. These results suggest that PixRestore maintains strong restoration quality even in the one-step setting.

Effect of Single-step Finetuning. We finetune the multi-step model into a one-step generator. Compared with A9, the final PixRestore (A10) improves PSNR from 28.07 to 28.49, LPIPS from 0.1202 to 0.1120, and MUSIQ from 53.34 to 55.52, while keeping NFE at 1. This shows that one-step fine-tuning improves restoration quality while retaining one-step efficiency.

Flow Pretraining vs. Regression Training. Table 5 compares our training pipeline with direct regression training under the same backbone, loss functions (with one-step finetuning), and total training iterations. Flow pretraining followed by one-step finetuning improves PSNR from 27.00 to 28.49, SSIM from 0.8179 to 0.8589, LPIPS from 0.1494 to 0.1120, and MUSIQ from 52.00 to 55.52. This shows that the gain comes from the flow-based pretraining stage.

4.5  Scalability

Fig. 6 illustrates the scalability of PixRestore by varying the Transformer size and pixel patch size. A smaller patch yields more image tokens and thus more computation, which improves LPIPS for the same backbone; for example, the S model improves the LPIPS from about 0.129 with $p=16$ to about 0.101 with $p=4$. Enlarging the backbone at a fixed patch size brings a similar gain. Across all configurations, LPIPS decreases as GFLOPs increase, with a correlation of $-0.96$. Consistent with the scaling behavior reported for DiT [16], this smooth trend suggests that PixRestore can benefit from scaling along two axes: a smaller patch preserves more local evidence, while a larger backbone provides stronger global modeling.

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Degradation	Metric	PromptIR	PromptIR∗	DiffUIR	DA-CLIP	DA-CLIP∗	FoundIR	FoundIR∗	UniRestore	FoundIR-v2	FoundIR-v2∗	Flux-IR	Flux-IR∗	FAPE-IR	FAPE-IR∗	PR	PR-B
De-rainstreak	MUSIQ$\uparrow$	59.90	60.06	61.02	62.23	59.94	61.00	60.87	62.58	63.06	62.57	62.98	60.23	61.07	59.53	62.62	62.78
	Affine-NR$\downarrow$	-0.90	-0.90	-0.92	-0.91	-0.91	-0.90	-0.92	-0.89	-0.96	-0.96	-0.94	-0.89	-1.00	-1.00	-1.02	-1.03
	DR-Score $\uparrow$	30.85	30.05	33.77	33.62	51.68	31.48	38.83	32.87	49.07	71.72	25.50	28.37	64.73	76.32	72.12	74.69
Deblur	MUSIQ$\uparrow$	34.28	32.57	41.64	46.61	43.92	32.85	34.10	49.26	69.99	72.78	55.26	65.73	44.89	45.84	53.37	56.56
	Affine-NR$\downarrow$	-0.73	-0.70	-0.78	-0.77	-0.76	-0.70	-0.72	-0.81	-1.04	-1.10	-0.87	-1.00	-0.80	-0.83	-0.88	-0.93
	DR-Score $\uparrow$	26.56	31.08	28.12	48.78	45.22	26.58	29.35	46.77	66.66	74.94	38.09	72.18	63.35	65.41	65.43	73.08
De-raindrop	MUSIQ$\uparrow$	64.18	63.47	64.04	66.26	54.46	61.85	60.62	63.87	65.81	57.74	65.60	66.28	52.71	39.61	47.99	54.54
	Affine-NR$\downarrow$	-0.83	-0.78	-0.82	-0.87	-0.71	-0.77	-0.71	-0.78	-0.83	-0.79	-0.92	-1.02	-0.85	-0.76	-0.72	-0.80
	DR-Score$\uparrow$	25.70	26.15	22.10	37.63	44.65	26.57	32.38	26.00	34.30	62.59	36.05	36.03	80.73	80.82	74.88	80.62
Desnow	MUSIQ$\uparrow$	58.96	59.27	59.92	59.74	59.36	60.24	60.15	60.30	63.35	63.46	58.33	62.12	57.96	58.68	62.69	62.65
	Affine-NR$\downarrow$	-0.74	-0.75	-0.77	-0.78	-0.77	-0.75	-0.75	-0.73	-0.83	-0.86	-0.76	-0.89	-0.86	-0.88	-0.90	-0.91
	DR-Score $\uparrow$	26.90	34.17	39.53	45.99	46.69	28.01	32.45	32.13	46.90	64.89	38.63	50.63	71.57	71.73	71.86	74.70
Dehaze	MUSIQ$\uparrow$	59.83	60.40	59.66	61.00	60.21	60.26	60.55	60.85	63.38	61.32	63.39	60.32	59.77	60.33	61.93	61.47
	Affine-NR$\downarrow$	-0.88	-0.88	-0.87	-0.88	-0.87	-0.87	-0.88	-0.82	-0.90	-0.86	-0.89	-0.83	-0.88	-0.90	-0.93	-0.93
	DR-Score $\uparrow$	32.90	37.68	24.55	32.36	28.86	31.02	32.43	47.43	42.61	37.52	40.37	40.74	32.67	35.94	44.51	42.06
Low-light	MUSIQ$\uparrow$	47.67	55.03	54.21	64.66	53.18	49.61	57.10	48.47	63.33	61.31	54.10	52.75	49.91	57.60	58.17	58.63
	Affine-NR$\downarrow$	-0.88	-0.92	-0.71	-0.95	-0.90	-0.89	-0.98	-0.85	-1.00	-0.94	-0.93	-0.91	-0.89	-0.99	-0.98	-0.99
	DR-Score$\uparrow$	31.65	67.03	59.33	66.24	65.10	31.70	65.05	38.87	71.25	66.62	58.07	54.71	38.70	75.09	62.38	62.13
Average	MUSIQ$\uparrow$	54.14	55.13	56.75	60.08	55.18	54.30	55.56	57.55	64.82	63.20	59.45	61.24	54.39	53.60	57.80	59.44
	Affine-NR$\downarrow$	-0.83	-0.82	-0.81	-0.86	-0.82	-0.81	-0.83	-0.81	-0.93	-0.92	-0.89	-0.92	-0.88	-0.88	-0.91	-0.93
	DR-Score $\uparrow$	29.09	37.69	34.57	44.10	47.03	29.23	38.42	37.51	51.80	63.05	39.45	47.11	58.63	67.55	65.20	67.88

4.6  Generalization to Real-world Test Set

We test all methods on real-world test data to evaluate their generalization ability to out-of-domain scenarios. Since no GT images are available, we report MUSIQ and AFINE-NR as auxiliary no-reference quality metrics, while relying primarily on DR-Score and visual comparisons to assess degradation removal. The results are shown in Table 6. We see that retraining on our training data improves the average DR-Score of many existing methods, but the improvements are not consistent across degradation types. For example, retrained DA-CLIP substantially improves its DR-Score on de-rainstreak, from 33.62 to 51.68, but its score decreases on deblur, from 48.78 to 45.22. This indicates that gains on one degradation may come at the expense of performance drop on another under the unified restoration setting.

It can also be seen that some strong competing methods show leading scores of MUSIQ and Afine-NR on some degradation types. For example, FoundIR-v2 and FoundIR-v2^∗ obtain the highest average MUSIQ scores, but perform poorly on raindrop removal. Flux-IR^∗ performs the best on MUSIQ for de-raindrop, but its degradation removal performance on rainstreak is poor. As we discussed in Sec. 4.1, the NR-IQA metrics such as MUSIQ and Afine-NR cannot reflect the real degradation removal performance, and this is why we propose DR-Score to more reliably measure this important ability. From Table 6, we see that PixRestore-B achieves the best average DR-Score of 67.88, followed by FAPE-IR^∗ at 67.55. This suggests that PixRestore offers a better overall balance between degradation removal and perceptual quality.

Figs. 7 and 8 present visual comparisons on six real-world degradation types. We see that the original versions of many baseline methods often fail to remove the target degradation sufficiently, while their retrained versions on our training data shown better degradation removal performance, yet they still suffer from residual artifacts, over-smoothing, color bias, or unstable detail reconstruction. In contrast, PixRestore demonstrates more balanced restoration results, achieving stronger degradation removal together with more natural color, clearer structures, and fewer artifacts. For example, in the desnow case, some competing methods leave visible snow residues, whereas PixRestore restores a cleaner image with better structural clarity. In the dehaze example, many competing methods produce grayish or flat-looking outputs with limited visibility, while PixRestore reveals clearer scene content and more natural contrast.

 5  Conclusion

We presented PixRestore, a VAE-free pixel-space diffusion transformer for unified image restoration. By performing flow matching directly on patchified pixels and incorporating adaptive hierarchical DINO guidance in both conditioning and supervision, PixRestore achieved faithful restoration with strong perceptual quality across diverse degradations while remaining compact and efficient with single-step inference. Larger PixRestore variants further improve performance, demonstrating the scalability of our design.

Limitations. PixRestore has several limitations. First, due to the DiT architecture and fixed tokenization setting, a model trained at one resolution cannot be directly extended to higher-resolution without retraining or architectural modification. Second, compared with billion-scale T2I models, the compact PixRestore backbone may encounter difficulties under extremely information-scarce degradations. Finally, our DR-Score relies on a proprietary VLM, introducing potential differences across model updates. In future work, we will explore more resolution-flexible architectures, stronger visual priors, and dedicated IR-specific quality metrics.

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The following materials are provided in this appendix:

• Details of training data and real-world test data collection (see Sec. 4.1 of the main paper).

• Pixel-space vs. latent-space diffusion models for unified image restoration (see Sec. 3.1 of the main paper).

• Visual foundation prior for unified image restoration (see Sec. 3.2 of the main paper).

• Details of DR-Score (see Sec. 4.1 of the main paper).

• More public benchmark comparisons, including the per-dataset numerical comparisons and more visual comparisons (Sec. 4.2 of the main paper).

Appendix A Training Data and Real-World Test Data

We build a training corpus of about 2.83M images spanning eight restoration tasks: deblur, dehaze, denoise, de-rainstreak, de-raindrop, desnowing, low-light enhancement, and super-resolution (SR). During training, samples are drawn from these tasks with equal probability. Table S.1 summarizes the training data sources for each degradation type, highlighting the diversity of both degradation patterns and scene content.

For haze, rainstreak, and snow, which depend strongly on scene depth, we further incorporate commonly used datasets with image-depth pairs and synthesize degradations following the pipelines of MioIR [55] and RealRestorer [56]. For denoising, we synthesize noisy inputs by adding Gaussian noise with three noise levels, i.e., $\sigma =15,25,$ and $50$, following DnCNN [1]. For SR, we evaluate the $4\times$ setting, with low-quality (LQ) inputs resized to $512\times 512$ to match the high-quality (HQ) images before feeding them into the model. There is no image-level overlap between the training data and the evaluated public benchmarks. For datasets without an official train/test split, such as PolyU [35] and ScreenSR [43], we reserve a portion of about 10% for testing and use the rest for training.

For real-world evaluation, we collect benchmarks covering six degradation types, each containing 100 real photographs, as summarized in Table S.2. These images are used to evaluate the generalization ability of restoration methods and do not have ground-truth (GT) references. We do not include real-world denoising and SR in this benchmark because they are difficult to define as isolated degradations in real images. In practice, real-world low-quality (LQ) images usually contain mixed degradations: low-light images are often accompanied by noticeable noise, while real-world low-resolution images are also commonly affected by blur and noise. Therefore, we focus on six representative real-world degradation types, which are sufficient to assess the generalization performance of different methods. All real-world images are resized to $512\times 512$ for testing.

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Degradation	Training data
Deblur	GoPro [33], RealBlur [57], UHD-Blur [3], LSD-Defocus [58]
Dehaze	RESIDE [2], UHD-Haze [3], WeatherBench-haze [41], UniSer-Haze [59], synthetic data from UrbanSyn [60], BlendedMVS [61] and MegaDepth [62]
De-raindrop	RaindropClarity [63], RainDS-Real-RainDrop [36],
de-rainstreak	Rain13K [64], RealRain-1k [37], UAV-Rain1k [38], FoundIR-rain [9], RainDS-Real-RainStreak [36], synthetic data from UrbanSyn [60],
Desnow	Snow100K [65], WeatherBench-snow [41], synthetic data from UrbanSyn [60],
Denoise	SIDD [66], PolyU [35], synthetic Gaussian noise DF2K [34, 67]
Low-light
enhancement	LOL [40], UHD-LL [39], DarkFace [68], FoundIR-low-light [9], NTIRE-LLIE [69]
Super-resolution (SR)	RealESRGAN degradation from DF2K [34, 67], RealSR [42], ScreenSR [43]

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Degradation	Real-world test data
Deblur	GyroBlur-Real [70]
Dehaze	RTTS and OpenReal-fog [44]
De-raindrop	OpenReal-raindrop [44]
De-rainstreak	OpenReal-rainstreak [44] and DiffUIR[10]
Desnow	Snow100K-realistic [65] and OpenReal-snow [44]
Low-light
enhancement	OpenReal-night [44] and ExDark [71]

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Degradation	Latent DiT with FLUX-VAE	Latent DiT with Qwen-VAE	Latent DiT with SD2-VAE	Pixel DiT
SR	25.59/0.2038/58.68	25.62/0.1992/62.25	25.03/0.2586/58.53	26.48/0.2067/57.80
Deblur	26.66/0.1617/46.53	26.93/0.1545/46.69	26.00/0.1921/45.23	27.17/0.1850/41.76
Dehaze	15.31/0.2253/54.56	15.16/0.2391/52.50	15.08/0.2659/53.31	24.78/0.1020/58.17
Denoise	31.97/0.0952/47.22	32.33/0.1021/48.37	30.65/0.1252/47.90	32.58/0.1179/51.32
De-raindrop	20.43/0.2257/62.79	20.63/0.2463/64.71	20.01/0.2751/62.46	23.19/0.1707/66.66
De-rainstreak	25.07/0.1478/46.49	25.34/0.1821/47.63	24.53/0.1876/46.00	30.19/0.1350/49.43
Desnow	27.82/0.1304/49.00	28.41/0.1190/49.39	27.30/0.1483/49.45	28.96/0.1301/48.58
Low-light enhancement	10.82/0.4572/40.64	10.82/0.4530/42.13	10.81/0.4834/39.73	20.80/0.2122/57.98
Overall	22.63/0.2109/50.86	22.80/0.2181/51.87	22.10/0.2483/50.38	26.62/0.1593/54.32

Appendix B Pixel-space vs. Latent-space

In the main paper, we compare pixel-space and latent-space diffusion models using the average results over all eight degradation types, and pixel diffusion shows a clear advantage for unified image restoration (UIR). Here, we further present the per-degradation results in Table S.3.

We conduct the comparison under the same LightningDiT-S [27] backbone and training protocol. The pixel model directly operates on RGB patches with a patch size of 8, while the latent models take latent representations encoded by FLUX-VAE [15], Qwen-VAE [29], and SD2-VAE [24] with a latent patch size of 1. This design keeps the same spatial compression ratio across models for a fair comparison. None of these models uses an external visual foundation model, such as DINOv2 [18]. During inference, all models use 10 sampling steps and a guidance scale of 1.0. We evaluate them on 15 public benchmarks covering eight degradation types. Following the evaluation protocol in Sec. 4.1 of the main paper, we first compute each metric on each test dataset, and then average the results with equal weight within each degradation type.

More specifically, on SR and deblurring, the latent diffusion model with Qwen-VAE achieves better perceptual scores of LPIPS (0.1992 vs. 0.2067 on SR, 0.1545 vs. 0.1850 on deblurring) and MUSIQ (62.25 vs. 57.80 on SR, 46.69 vs. 41.76 on deblurring). For dehazing, de-raindrop removal, de-rainstreak removal, and low-light enhancement, Pixel DiT performs best on all three metrics. The gains are especially large on dehazing (24.78 PSNR, 0.1020 LPIPS, and 58.17 MUSIQ) and low-light enhancement (20.80 PSNR, 0.2122 LPIPS, and 57.98 MUSIQ), far surpassing all latent alternatives. For denoising, Pixel DiT achieves the best PSNR and MUSIQ (32.58 and 51.32), while FLUX-VAE gives the best LPIPS (0.0952). For desnowing, Pixel DiT leads in PSNR (28.96), whereas Qwen-VAE and SD2-VAE lead in LPIPS (0.1190) and MUSIQ (49.45), respectively. Overall, latent models can achieve better perceptual scores on several specific degradations, but pixel-space modeling delivers consistently the best restoration fidelity across diverse tasks.

Appendix C Visual Foundation Prior

We leverage a frozen visual foundation encoder to provide dense visual cues, as the main paper presents. To choose the encoder, we compare four frozen candidates: CLIP [30], DINOv2 [18], MAE [31], and SigLIP [32]. All candidates share the same ViT-B architecture and parameter count, and we extract dense tokens from the same layer position (the 11th layer). Meanwhile, the pixel DiT, training data, and optimization schedule are kept fixed, and only the frozen encoder differs, so that the comparison cleanly reflects the effectiveness of different pretrained vision models for UIR. During inference, all models use 10 sampling steps and a guidance scale of 1.0. Table S.4 reports metrics averaged over 15 public benchmarks covering 8 degradation types. The self-supervised DINOv2 achieves the best overall fidelity and perceptual balance, while CLIP obtains a marginally higher MUSIQ score. We attribute this to its pretraining objective. Through self-distillation over global and local views, DINO learns dense, spatially precise tokens that preserve the fine structures and textures that restoration must recover, while its tokens remain semantically discriminative and encode high-level content. This dual property is what UIR needs: spatial details are used to reconstruct faithful pixels, and semantic cues are used to distinguish reliable content from degradation. In contrast, CLIP and SigLIP are aligned to text and emphasize global semantics, discarding much of the spatial detail, while MAE targets low-level pixel reconstruction and yields less discriminative structural cues. We therefore adopt DINOv2 as the default encoder.

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Visual Prior	PSNR (dB) $\uparrow$	SSIM $\uparrow$	LPIPS $\downarrow$	MUSIQ $\uparrow$
CLIP-B	26.61	0.8441	0.1598	54.30
MAE-B	26.70	0.8454	0.1593	54.20
SigLIP-B	26.66	0.8449	0.1592	54.19
DINOv2-B	27.25	0.8500	0.1531	54.21

Appendix D DR-Score Details

As discussed in the main paper, common full-reference metrics require GT images, which are unavailable for many real-world benchmarks. Existing no-reference metrics mainly assess overall visual quality, but they often fail to capture whether the target degradation has been removed from the restored image. To address this issue, we introduce DR-Score, a vision-language model (VLM)-based auxiliary metric to evaluate degradation removal performance in UIR tasks, rather than to replace standard metrics.

Evaluation Protocol. We use Gemini 3.1 pro [53] as the evaluator, as shown in Fig. S.1. For each test sample, we provide the VLM with the low-quality (LQ) input image, the restored output image, and the restoration task type. Each task type is paired with a short description of the target goal. The VLM compares the restored image with the LQ input and is asked to judge whether the target task has been completed. Specifically, for deblur, the VLM is asked to judge whether the motion or defocus blur has been removed and sharp details are recovered. For dehaze, VLM judges whether the haze or fog has been removed and whether the scene becomes clearer. For de-rainstreak and de-raindrop, it judges whether rain streaks or raindrops are removed and whether the occluded background is restored. For desnow, it judges whether snow is removed. For low-light enhancement, it judges whether the image is properly brightened, denoised, and detailed. For denoising, it judges whether noise is removed while textures are preserved. For SR, it judges whether sharp details are restored without over-smoothing or obvious artifacts. The score ranges from 0 to 100, with 100 indicating that the target degradation is removed completely and cleanly and 0 indicating that it is still fully present.

We also ask the VLM to return the task type, the score, and a short reason. As shown in Fig. S.1, a higher score indicates better task completion, while a lower score indicates that the degradation or restoration artifacts remain. In this way, DR-Score provides a simple auxiliary signal for degradation removal evaluation.

Stability of DR-Score. Because VLM outputs can be stochastic, we evaluate each image five times and report the average score in all experiments. To verify stability, we calculate two complementary statistics.

(i) Run-level standard deviation (std). For each method, we first average scores over all test images within each run and then compute the std across repeated runs. The resulting std value is about 0.10–0.43, indicating that the mean scores at method-level are highly reproducible.

(ii) Image-level std. For each image, we compute the std across its repeated scores and then average over images. The std value is about 5.3–6.4, showing that individual-image scores can vary.

Despite per-image score fluctuations, the std of DR-Scores at method-level is below 0.5, confirming that the relative ranking between methods is stable. We therefore report mean DR-scores in the experiments.

Human Alignment. We then conduct a human study to examine how well different metrics agree with human judgment in UIR tasks, including DR-Score, MUSIQ [51], AFINE-NR [52], TOPIQ [72], and MANIQA [73].

The study is based on pairwise comparisons. For each test case, annotators are shown one LQ image and two restored results produced by different methods for the same task. They are asked to select the better result of the restoration task. The annotators are instructed to focus on three aspects: whether the target degradation is removed, whether the main scene content is preserved, and whether obvious artifacts are suppressed. We sample 20 cases for each degradation type from the real-world test sets, including deblur, dehaze, de-rainstreak, de-raindrop, desnow, and low-light enhancement. For each pair, two methods are randomly selected from retrained models (DA-CLIP, FoundIR, FoundIR-v2, FAPE-IR) and PixRestore. The two results are presented in random order to avoid position bias. We also hide the method names and do not show any metric values.

A total of 20 annotators participated in this study. After collecting the annotations, we average the human choices and convert them into pairwise preferences. We then compare these preferences with the pairwise ranking induced by each metric. A pair is counted as aligned if the image preferred by humans also receives a better metric score. We report the average alignment ratio in the left part of Fig. S.2. DR-Score achieves the highest agreement (90.7%) with human preference, showing that it better reflects task completion and degradation removal than existing no-reference quality metrics. This supports its use as a practical auxiliary metric for real-world UIR evaluation.

Failure Cases. DR-Score still has several limitations. It can be less reliable when two restored results are visually very similar and differ only in subtle appearance factors, such as brightness, local contrast, or color tone, as shown in the right part of Fig. S.2. In such cases, even human annotators need to inspect carefully, and the VLM may fail to tell the difference.

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Method	GoPro						UHD-blur
	PSNR$\uparrow$	SSIM$\uparrow$	LPIPS$\downarrow$	DISTS$\downarrow$	MUSIQ$\uparrow$	AFINE-NR$\downarrow$	PSNR$\uparrow$	SSIM$\uparrow$	LPIPS$\downarrow$	DISTS$\downarrow$	MUSIQ$\uparrow$	AFINE-NR$\downarrow$
PromptIR	23.43	0.7903	0.3035	0.1972	25.50	-0.5874	24.21	0.7265	0.3228	0.2418	29.81	-0.6163
PromptIR∗	29.82	0.8775	0.2000	0.1440	36.18	-0.7123	28.39	0.8172	0.2101	0.1681	40.52	-0.7570
DiffUIR	29.32	0.8669	0.2041	0.1492	35.93	-0.7137	26.39	0.7731	0.2476	0.1907	38.01	-0.7075
UniRestore	24.11	0.7496	0.2216	0.1408	45.93	-0.7896	23.63	0.6914	0.2595	0.2024	42.99	-0.6870
DA-CLIP	28.57	0.8554	0.1279	0.0994	41.05	-0.7329	26.23	0.7671	0.2003	0.1612	42.83	-0.7479
DA-CLIP∗	28.87	0.8536	0.1317	0.1031	42.91	-0.7444	27.71	0.7920	0.1630	0.1264	47.05	-0.7656
FoundIR	27.02	0.8121	0.2610	0.1800	29.96	-0.6276	27.56	0.7971	0.2250	0.1762	38.80	-0.7544
FoundIR∗	29.95	0.8762	0.1887	0.1393	35.81	-0.7297	28.33	0.8170	0.2084	0.1613	39.98	-0.7696
FoundIR-v2	24.48	0.7179	0.2224	0.1451	57.73	-0.8954	24.32	0.6980	0.2183	0.1680	63.23	-1.0422
FoundIR-v2∗	24.98	0.7470	0.1965	0.1262	56.90	-0.8914	24.97	0.7232	0.1862	0.1385	58.39	-0.9774
Flux-IR	24.03	0.7012	0.2408	0.1550	55.90	-0.8500	22.98	0.6479	0.3084	0.2153	53.29	-0.8064
Flux-IR∗	22.59	0.6716	0.2717	0.1936	60.22	-0.9609	21.71	0.6176	0.2918	0.2137	58.22	-0.9313
FAPE-IR	28.02	0.8374	0.1527	0.1058	41.62	-0.7781	25.58	0.7417	0.2669	0.2054	35.00	-0.7267
FAPE-IR∗	28.68	0.8505	0.1347	0.0907	38.84	-0.7403	27.25	0.7908	0.1807	0.1282	41.57	-0.7694
PixRestore-S	28.96	0.8553	0.1067	0.0833	43.39	-0.8182	27.67	0.8016	0.1335	0.1046	49.73	-0.8105
PixRestore-B	30.00	0.8805	0.0895	0.0721	44.74	-0.8354	28.46	0.8218	0.1206	0.0949	49.54	-0.8200
PixRestore-L	30.79	0.8948	0.0787	0.0657	45.51	-0.8616	28.96	0.8346	0.1117	0.0891	50.45	-0.8515
PixRestore-XL	31.23	0.9025	0.0721	0.0621	46.34	-0.8712	29.07	0.8407	0.1090	0.0854	50.34	-0.8487

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Method	RESIDE-6K						UHD-Haze
	PSNR$\uparrow$	SSIM$\uparrow$	LPIPS$\downarrow$	DISTS$\downarrow$	MUSIQ$\uparrow$	AFINE-NR$\downarrow$	PSNR$\uparrow$	SSIM$\uparrow$	LPIPS$\downarrow$	DISTS$\downarrow$	MUSIQ$\uparrow$	AFINE-NR$\downarrow$
PromptIR	26.69	0.9572	0.0460	0.0418	51.24	-0.9422	15.98	0.8035	0.2391	0.1605	63.94	-0.9765
PromptIR∗	24.01	0.9417	0.0642	0.0553	51.58	-0.9362	18.49	0.8445	0.2054	0.1216	63.45	-1.0058
DiffUIR	24.66	0.9311	0.0708	0.0582	50.59	-0.9314	16.15	0.8001	0.2572	0.1768	62.57	-0.9683
UniRestore	23.63	0.9162	0.1171	0.0869	55.68	-0.9630	16.59	0.7776	0.3073	0.1849	62.14	-0.9155
DA-CLIP	28.66	0.9273	0.0559	0.0463	53.52	-0.9784	17.27	0.8230	0.2063	0.1307	65.88	-1.0698
DA-CLIP∗	28.15	0.9579	0.0431	0.0409	51.31	-0.9439	15.70	0.7979	0.2487	0.1746	63.98	-0.9540
FoundIR	16.52	0.8381	0.1665	0.1304	49.68	-0.8612	13.62	0.7421	0.3499	0.2533	59.75	-0.8267
FoundIR∗	25.07	0.9525	0.0523	0.0483	50.61	-0.9464	16.91	0.8282	0.2146	0.1441	64.37	-0.9976
FoundIR-v2	19.01	0.8101	0.1837	0.1318	57.83	-0.9396	19.11	0.7309	0.2018	0.1357	69.04	-1.0056
FoundIR-v2∗	18.57	0.7925	0.1997	0.1342	56.12	-0.9191	19.62	0.7365	0.1870	0.1222	68.08	-1.0543
Flux-IR	15.64	0.7796	0.2591	0.1639	65.46	-1.0185	13.83	0.7402	0.3361	0.2333	61.74	-0.8161
Flux-IR∗	17.27	0.8416	0.1578	0.1074	50.54	-0.8348	14.65	0.7706	0.3052	0.2083	60.48	-0.8251
FAPE-IR	31.36	0.9628	0.0378	0.0364	50.35	-0.9573	19.20	0.8386	0.1542	0.0937	66.12	-1.1555
FAPE-IR∗	28.90	0.9575	0.0411	0.0385	50.32	-0.9488	21.78	0.8537	0.1442	0.0905	65.45	-1.1361
PixRestore-S	28.41	0.9555	0.0473	0.0444	52.81	-0.9777	22.51	0.8729	0.1318	0.0855	66.98	-1.1836
PixRestore-B	29.87	0.9636	0.0390	0.0388	51.79	-0.9737	23.41	0.8820	0.1188	0.0760	67.26	-1.2451
PixRestore-L	30.63	0.9660	0.0365	0.0366	52.11	-0.9772	23.23	0.8836	0.1227	0.0771	66.81	-1.2381
PixRestore-XL	31.73	0.9677	0.0340	0.0355	51.83	-0.9741	23.14	0.8827	0.1223	0.0776	66.92	-1.2237

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Method	DIV2K (Gaussian)						PolyU
	PSNR$\uparrow$	SSIM$\uparrow$	LPIPS$\downarrow$	DISTS$\downarrow$	MUSIQ$\uparrow$	AFINE-NR$\downarrow$	PSNR$\uparrow$	SSIM$\uparrow$	LPIPS$\downarrow$	DISTS$\downarrow$	MUSIQ$\uparrow$	AFINE-NR$\downarrow$
PromptIR	34.57	0.9079	0.1411	0.1384	64.24	-0.9098	30.50	0.8978	0.3506	0.1825	30.88	-0.6068
PromptIR∗	33.91	0.8975	0.1463	0.1388	61.00	-0.8517	37.00	0.9780	0.0744	0.0742	32.70	-0.6156
DiffUIR	21.24	0.7540	0.3437	0.2523	55.21	-0.7013	31.98	0.9221	0.2769	0.1588	32.67	-0.6270
UniRestore	30.38	0.8728	0.1659	0.1420	64.25	-0.8868	33.11	0.9209	0.3012	0.1918	31.60	-0.5629
DA-CLIP	28.91	0.7532	0.2412	0.1764	57.33	-0.8155	25.79	0.8957	0.2506	0.1765	33.00	-0.6137
DA-CLIP∗	30.76	0.7704	0.2448	0.1570	58.12	-0.7929	37.19	0.9753	0.0477	0.0761	33.67	-0.5932
FoundIR	27.14	0.6061	0.4920	0.2574	45.98	-0.6097	37.77	0.9789	0.0668	0.0707	33.55	-0.6303
FoundIR∗	34.06	0.8992	0.1572	0.1469	62.82	-0.9074	38.25	0.9837	0.0529	0.1022	34.24	-0.6195
FoundIR-v2	25.43	0.6544	0.2658	0.1825	62.76	-0.9197	28.31	0.8418	0.2913	0.2066	52.61	-0.8119
FoundIR-v2∗	25.96	0.6584	0.2488	0.1837	62.60	-0.9080	30.39	0.8410	0.3290	0.1943	41.44	-0.6478
Flux-IR	21.33	0.4780	0.5758	0.2660	50.37	-0.7322	30.08	0.8903	0.2637	0.2073	43.26	-0.7832
Flux-IR∗	24.34	0.5837	0.4296	0.2386	49.22	-0.7338	29.26	0.8984	0.3281	0.1716	32.85	-0.6348
FAPE-IR	31.09	0.8540	0.1147	0.1013	60.49	-0.8739	34.89	0.9636	0.1329	0.1212	35.29	-0.6526
FAPE-IR∗	31.32	0.8572	0.1080	0.0978	60.52	-0.8830	37.11	0.9772	0.0401	0.0522	33.52	-0.6135
PixRestore-S	33.04	0.8923	0.0783	0.0863	63.62	-0.9410	36.71	0.9749	0.0465	0.0607	34.54	-0.6139
PixRestore-B	33.40	0.8968	0.0725	0.0777	63.84	-0.9591	35.84	0.9745	0.0402	0.0636	34.15	-0.6030
PixRestore-L	33.35	0.8962	0.0730	0.0768	64.12	-0.9671	35.91	0.9736	0.0385	0.0709	34.39	-0.6022
PixRestore-XL	33.46	0.8979	0.0729	0.0774	64.06	-0.9648	36.50	0.9745	0.0341	0.0753	33.95	-0.5994

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Method	RainDS-real						RealRain-1K
	PSNR$\uparrow$	SSIM$\uparrow$	LPIPS$\downarrow$	DISTS$\downarrow$	MUSIQ$\uparrow$	AFINE-NR$\downarrow$	PSNR$\uparrow$	SSIM$\uparrow$	LPIPS$\downarrow$	DISTS$\downarrow$	MUSIQ$\uparrow$	AFINE-NR$\downarrow$
PromptIR	25.15	0.7483	0.2047	0.1392	60.54	-0.8602	23.85	0.7531	0.5011	0.3370	42.82	-0.6698
PromptIR∗	26.62	0.7933	0.1977	0.1254	61.79	-0.8963	30.23	0.8845	0.3341	0.2554	36.49	-0.5757
DiffUIR	26.11	0.7888	0.1885	0.1168	63.88	-0.9157	22.91	0.7348	0.5084	0.3329	45.21	-0.7440
UniRestore	23.47	0.7143	0.3220	0.1838	65.71	-0.8797	21.52	0.7439	0.5226	0.3540	45.97	-0.7192
DA-CLIP	24.66	0.7467	0.1834	0.1213	63.20	-0.9041	24.35	0.7654	0.4861	0.3139	46.39	-0.7354
DA-CLIP∗	25.72	0.7516	0.1432	0.0859	63.31	-0.9261	37.50	0.9695	0.0665	0.0910	32.27	-0.6034
FoundIR	26.78	0.7890	0.1630	0.1075	63.26	-0.9045	26.97	0.8635	0.3278	0.2523	39.15	-0.6486
FoundIR∗	27.27	0.8120	0.1993	0.1191	67.29	-0.9812	37.44	0.9655	0.1193	0.1216	35.47	-0.6340
FoundIR-v2	23.65	0.6078	0.1956	0.1111	63.58	-0.9722	22.69	0.7226	0.5362	0.3326	48.23	-0.7375
FoundIR-v2∗	23.74	0.6043	0.1906	0.1088	64.82	-1.0001	31.96	0.9153	0.1641	0.1556	36.17	-0.6297
Flux-IR	22.34	0.6665	0.2695	0.1769	64.41	-0.9676	19.63	0.5801	0.6554	0.3952	50.43	-0.7374
Flux-IR∗	21.66	0.6410	0.2912	0.1803	62.00	-0.9306	20.37	0.6278	0.6110	0.3840	45.93	-0.6811
FAPE-IR	26.53	0.7636	0.1407	0.0835	62.03	-0.9748	28.50	0.8817	0.3232	0.2523	42.51	-0.7340
FAPE-IR∗	26.67	0.7642	0.1270	0.0746	61.14	-0.9816	37.14	0.9748	0.0535	0.0778	31.15	-0.6092
PixRestore-S	27.06	0.7950	0.1180	0.0773	66.07	-1.0433	37.50	0.9744	0.0625	0.1038	32.07	-0.6152
PixRestore-B	27.41	0.8038	0.1078	0.0693	65.65	-1.0461	38.28	0.9758	0.0456	0.0941	32.27	-0.6153
PixRestore-L	27.54	0.8065	0.0990	0.0664	65.60	-1.0532	38.51	0.9760	0.0404	0.0933	32.65	-0.6170
PixRestore-XL	27.58	0.8079	0.1000	0.0650	65.18	-1.0463	38.60	0.9753	0.0401	0.1028	32.81	-0.6160

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Method	RainDS-real						UAV-Rain1k
	PSNR$\uparrow$	SSIM$\uparrow$	LPIPS$\downarrow$	DISTS$\downarrow$	MUSIQ$\uparrow$	AFINE-NR$\downarrow$	PSNR$\uparrow$	SSIM$\uparrow$	LPIPS$\downarrow$	DISTS$\downarrow$	MUSIQ$\uparrow$	AFINE-NR$\downarrow$
PromptIR	20.70	0.7069	0.2773	0.1560	55.31	-0.8088	16.92	0.6855	0.4007	0.2211	66.57	-0.8022
PromptIR∗	24.53	0.7529	0.2637	0.1347	59.14	-0.8560	22.84	0.8482	0.1835	0.1305	68.19	-0.8475
DiffUIR	20.56	0.6996	0.3119	0.1678	56.28	-0.8034	17.13	0.7011	0.3790	0.2132	66.67	-0.7942
UniRestore	20.25	0.6906	0.3482	0.1888	58.44	-0.8111	16.75	0.5847	0.4746	0.2683	65.96	-0.7044
DA-CLIP	22.99	0.7018	0.1763	0.0977	61.66	-0.8832	17.26	0.6958	0.3667	0.2047	67.27	-0.8080
DA-CLIP∗	24.14	0.7077	0.1570	0.0905	60.92	-0.8855	23.01	0.8755	0.1079	0.0799	69.43	-0.9228
FoundIR	20.67	0.7171	0.3145	0.1749	59.34	-0.8041	17.07	0.6773	0.4026	0.2285	67.57	-0.7823
FoundIR∗	25.41	0.7708	0.2487	0.1319	65.20	-0.9316	23.40	0.8729	0.1397	0.0973	69.58	-0.9111
FoundIR-v2	20.22	0.5725	0.3079	0.1566	59.84	-0.8704	19.03	0.5194	0.2505	0.1560	69.47	-0.8975
FoundIR-v2∗	21.72	0.5641	0.2435	0.1255	64.75	-0.9876	19.91	0.5280	0.2165	0.1332	69.30	-0.9315
Flux-IR	21.01	0.6540	0.2335	0.1221	63.08	-1.0046	16.87	0.6377	0.4113	0.2328	66.83	-0.8472
Flux-IR∗	18.85	0.5672	0.3313	0.1964	68.66	-1.1729	16.76	0.5897	0.3218	0.2186	72.29	-1.0842
FAPE-IR	24.71	0.7255	0.1841	0.0930	59.93	-0.9452	18.06	0.6389	0.2598	0.1702	65.88	-0.8070
FAPE-IR∗	25.27	0.7263	0.1502	0.0790	58.40	-0.9358	22.49	0.7183	0.1607	0.1145	68.35	-0.9177
PixRestore-S	25.42	0.7394	0.1326	0.0761	61.54	-0.9911	23.54	0.8117	0.1190	0.1002	70.15	-0.9816
PixRestore-B	25.76	0.7461	0.1245	0.0720	61.41	-0.9928	24.65	0.8490	0.0928	0.0806	70.35	-1.0176
PixRestore-L	25.89	0.7504	0.1195	0.0686	61.30	-0.9963	25.16	0.8631	0.0810	0.0719	70.63	-1.0379
PixRestore-XL	26.01	0.7567	0.1171	0.0677	61.36	-0.9939	25.69	0.8774	0.0715	0.0655	70.55	-1.0392

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Method	UHD-LL						LOL
	PSNR$\uparrow$	SSIM$\uparrow$	LPIPS$\downarrow$	DISTS$\downarrow$	MUSIQ$\uparrow$	AFINE-NR$\downarrow$	PSNR$\uparrow$	SSIM$\uparrow$	LPIPS$\downarrow$	DISTS$\downarrow$	MUSIQ$\uparrow$	AFINE-NR$\downarrow$
PromptIR	11.82	0.5660	0.5088	0.3116	35.06	-0.6577	9.17	0.3902	0.5732	0.4415	38.49	-0.7859
PromptIR∗	25.33	0.8846	0.2303	0.1757	45.85	-0.6794	10.50	0.4916	0.4824	0.3268	44.53	-0.8607
DiffUIR	17.67	0.5064	0.6057	0.3320	37.19	-0.4779	25.76	0.9099	0.1581	0.1264	68.79	-0.9938
UniRestore	12.41	0.6102	0.4665	0.2903	36.98	-0.6417	9.48	0.4274	0.5347	0.3426	43.85	-0.7569
DA-CLIP	20.51	0.7436	0.3675	0.2201	48.51	-0.6172	23.99	0.8395	0.1263	0.1043	74.18	-1.0050
DA-CLIP∗	16.64	0.7776	0.2632	0.2016	47.98	-0.7589	19.38	0.8594	0.1626	0.1212	66.85	-0.9450
FoundIR	14.22	0.6984	0.3548	0.2386	42.38	-0.7037	16.47	0.7963	0.2519	0.1877	65.83	-1.0337
FoundIR∗	24.28	0.8885	0.2113	0.1687	51.48	-0.8552	22.40	0.9168	0.1471	0.1191	71.35	-1.0455
FoundIR-v2	16.40	0.7120	0.3643	0.2381	60.71	-0.9313	17.95	0.7776	0.2620	0.1674	67.72	-1.0373
FoundIR-v2∗	17.72	0.7272	0.3541	0.2273	55.85	-0.8751	16.36	0.7341	0.2834	0.1929	62.16	-0.9620
Flux-IR	15.35	0.5519	0.5455	0.2965	38.47	-0.5140	22.36	0.8525	0.1658	0.1032	72.10	-1.1667
Flux-IR∗	14.33	0.6028	0.4866	0.2852	37.25	-0.5275	22.47	0.8369	0.1906	0.1167	70.91	-1.2086
FAPE-IR	12.57	0.6315	0.3899	0.2669	39.07	-0.7489	26.34	0.8942	0.1261	0.1006	66.74	-1.0265
FAPE-IR∗	26.55	0.8980	0.1445	0.1096	51.54	-0.8156	25.53	0.9049	0.1296	0.1040	65.50	-1.0535
PixRestore-S	26.28	0.8889	0.1420	0.1060	53.31	-0.8461	24.96	0.8899	0.1300	0.0957	66.07	-1.0386
PixRestore-B	26.36	0.8886	0.1384	0.1010	53.45	-0.8534	25.08	0.8983	0.1212	0.0899	65.88	-1.0329
PixRestore-L	26.89	0.8928	0.1326	0.0979	54.53	-0.8613	25.30	0.8960	0.1273	0.0932	64.39	-1.0055
PixRestore-XL	26.37	0.8934	0.1324	0.0982	54.62	-0.8686	26.20	0.8955	0.1286	0.0949	63.64	-1.0015

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Method	WeatherBench
	PSNR$\uparrow$	SSIM$\uparrow$	LPIPS$\downarrow$	DISTS$\downarrow$	MUSIQ$\uparrow$	AFINE-NR$\downarrow$
PromptIR	22.26	0.7939	0.2452	0.1672	45.60	-0.6023
PromptIR∗	29.32	0.8532	0.1818	0.1402	46.30	-0.6161
DiffUIR	22.95	0.7948	0.2392	0.1667	48.10	-0.6185
UniRestore	22.33	0.7863	0.2464	0.1771	49.39	-0.6451
DA-CLIP	23.60	0.7971	0.2221	0.1558	46.48	-0.6127
DA-CLIP∗	28.31	0.8282	0.1360	0.1021	48.82	-0.6424
FoundIR	23.03	0.7999	0.2406	0.1630	45.77	-0.6029
FoundIR∗	29.82	0.8678	0.1524	0.1224	47.98	-0.6908
FoundIR-v2	24.72	0.7347	0.2513	0.1671	59.98	-0.8032
FoundIR-v2∗	26.28	0.7690	0.1824	0.1311	54.44	-0.7440
Flux-IR	21.74	0.7231	0.3434	0.2204	56.08	-0.6879
Flux-IR∗	21.79	0.6831	0.3023	0.1959	57.03	-0.7504
FAPE-IR	26.02	0.8191	0.1759	0.1189	46.29	-0.6280
FAPE-IR∗	30.19	0.8676	0.1136	0.0849	47.84	-0.6595
PixRestore-S	31.26	0.8859	0.0853	0.0669	49.86	-0.6829
PixRestore-B	31.93	0.8959	0.0688	0.0584	50.10	-0.6825
PixRestore-L	32.35	0.9039	0.0656	0.0569	50.36	-0.6859
PixRestore-XL	32.57	0.9077	0.0623	0.0553	50.25	-0.6864

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Method	RealSR						ScreenSR
	PSNR$\uparrow$	SSIM$\uparrow$	LPIPS$\downarrow$	DISTS$\downarrow$	MUSIQ$\uparrow$	AFINE-NR$\downarrow$	PSNR$\uparrow$	SSIM$\uparrow$	LPIPS$\downarrow$	DISTS$\downarrow$	MUSIQ$\uparrow$	AFINE-NR$\downarrow$
PromptIR	23.47	0.7380	0.4647	0.2670	25.95	-0.4435	25.05	0.7365	0.4140	0.2351	42.95	-0.7419
PromptIR∗	28.65	0.8051	0.3045	0.2382	45.99	-0.6821	26.54	0.7884	0.2633	0.2033	58.41	-0.8518
DiffUIR	27.40	0.7734	0.3744	0.2417	35.15	-0.4999	25.68	0.7431	0.3989	0.2338	48.34	-0.7720
UniRestore	24.84	0.7683	0.3358	0.2305	39.91	-0.5857	24.76	0.7403	0.3737	0.2263	53.30	-0.8091
DA-CLIP	24.21	0.7258	0.3910	0.2469	30.60	-0.4804	23.24	0.6321	0.3635	0.2265	47.89	-0.7682
DA-CLIP∗	27.72	0.7777	0.2213	0.1821	50.30	-0.7260	25.26	0.7393	0.2469	0.1705	64.42	-0.9523
FoundIR	26.13	0.7432	0.4474	0.2619	26.74	-0.4396	25.58	0.7365	0.4086	0.2365	42.63	-0.7437
FoundIR∗	28.74	0.8000	0.3354	0.2454	40.54	-0.6443	26.56	0.7903	0.2412	0.2048	61.52	-0.9192
FoundIR-v2	24.61	0.6682	0.3303	0.2248	68.03	-1.0134	23.09	0.6640	0.2616	0.1700	65.93	-0.9700
FoundIR-v2∗	24.83	0.6649	0.3206	0.2179	64.84	-0.9785	22.74	0.6411	0.1781	0.1185	72.46	-1.0921
Flux-IR	23.42	0.6599	0.3548	0.2465	69.74	-1.0971	21.56	0.6483	0.2258	0.1664	72.17	-1.2027
Flux-IR∗	22.41	0.5927	0.3668	0.2559	68.62	-1.0386	19.34	0.5778	0.3471	0.2479	71.41	-1.1189
FAPE-IR	27.92	0.7969	0.2325	0.1877	50.67	-0.8189	25.17	0.7495	0.3307	0.2077	52.83	-0.8243
FAPE-IR∗	29.06	0.8139	0.1843	0.1468	50.37	-0.8224	25.90	0.7546	0.2061	0.1398	61.45	-0.8721
PixRestore-S	28.40	0.7882	0.1776	0.1458	56.20	-0.8501	25.62	0.7578	0.1696	0.1258	66.40	-0.9682
PixRestore-B	28.43	0.7904	0.1646	0.1367	56.15	-0.8590	25.71	0.7642	0.1556	0.1211	67.20	-0.9940
PixRestore-L	28.55	0.7933	0.1590	0.1317	57.26	-0.8880	25.46	0.7508	0.1483	0.1227	68.72	-0.9846
PixRestore-XL	28.59	0.7956	0.1595	0.1332	56.37	-0.8922	25.17	0.7399	0.1504	0.1353	68.07	-0.9560

Appendix E More Public Benchmark Comparisons

In the main paper, we report the average results of each degradation type. In this appendix, we further provide detailed comparisons on each benchmark, including GoPro [33] and UHD-Blur [3] for deblurring, RESIDE-6K [2] and UHD-Haze [3] for dehazing, DIV2K [34] with Gaussian noise and PolyU [35] for denoising, RainDS-real [36] and RealRain-1k [37] for rain streak removal, RainDS-real [36] and UAV-Rain1k [38] for raindrop removal, UHD-LL [39] and LOL [40] for low-light enhancement, WeatherBench [41] for desnowing, and RealSR [42] and ScreenSR [43] for super-resolution. All images are center-cropped to 512 for testing.

The results are shown in Tables S.5–S.12. We see that PixRestore is not limited to a specific test dataset. It achieves strong and balanced performance across diverse restoration benchmarks. Some previous methods can obtain good no-reference scores by producing sharper or more contrastive outputs, but they often fall behind on fidelity-oriented full-reference metrics. For example, in the deblur task, FoundIR-v2 and Flux-IR^∗ obtain much higher MUSIQ and better AFINE-NR on GoPro and UHD-Blur, but their PSNR, SSIM, LPIPS, and DISTS are clearly worse than PixRestore. Compared with previous UIR methods, our model consistently ranks among the top methods on distortion metrics such as PSNR, SSIM, LPIPS, and DISTS. At the same time, it remains competitive on no-reference metrics such as MUSIQ and AFINE-NR.

We can see that there is a clear trend across almost all tasks: scaling the model size is beneficial. From PixRestore-S to PixRestore-B, to PixRestore-L, and to PixRestore-XL, scaling generally improves average performance, although some individual datasets show non-monotonic behavior. This trend is especially clear for deblur, dehaze, desnow, and de-raindrop, where larger models repeatedly deliver stronger restoration fidelity. Although the gains on MUSIQ or AFINE-NR are sometimes less monotonic, the larger variants still show more stable top-tier performance overall. These results suggest that PixRestore scales well, and that increasing model capacity is an effective way to improve UIR performance.

The results of retrained models using our training data also reveal an important pattern. Many existing methods retrained on our training data improve their performance on almost all datasets. Nonetheless, these retrained baselines remain behind PixRestore on the main full-reference metrics. This suggests that using better training data alone is not sufficient; the model design itself also matters.

We provide more visual comparisons in Figs. S.3 and S.4. Overall, the compared methods show different trade-offs between degradation removal and detail preservation. PixRestore consistently produces cleaner and more balanced results across diverse synthetic tasks. For example, in the desnow case of Fig. S.3, PixRestore removes snow more thoroughly while preserving fine fence structures. Similar trends can be observed in Fig. S.4. In deblurring, PixRestore restores sharper pole boundaries and cleaner background tree textures; in super-resolution, it recovers clearer brick patterns and more faithful structures than competing methods.