arXiv · 2509.06904
BIR-Adapter: A parameter-efficient diffusion adapter for blind image restoration
Abstract
We introduce the BIR-Adapter, a parameter-efficient diffusion adapter for blind image restoration. Diffusion-based restoration methods have demonstrated promising performance in addressing this fundamental problem in computer vision, typically relying on auxiliary feature extractors or extensive fine-tuning of pre-trained models. Building on the observation that large-scale pretrained diffusion models can retain informative representations under image degradations, BIR-Adapter introduces a parameter-efficient, plug-and-play attention mechanism that substantially reduces the number of trained parameters. To further improve reliability, we adapt a sampling guidance mechanism that mitigates hallucinations during restoration. Experiments on synthetic and real-world degradations demonstrate that BIR-Adapter achieves competitive, and in several settings superior, performance compared to state-of-the-art methods while requiring up to 36x fewer trained parameters. Moreover, the adapter-based design enables integration into existing models. We validate this generality by extending a super-resolution-only diffusion model to handle additional unknown degradations, highlighting the adaptability of our approach for broader image restoration tasks.
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Cem Eteke, Alexander Griessel, Wolfgang Kellerer, Eckehard Steinbach. 2025-09-08. BIR-Adapter: A parameter-efficient diffusion adapter for blind image restoration. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.patcog.2026.113824
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