Debiased All-in-one Image Restoration with Task Uncertainty Regularization

Abstract

All-in-one image restoration is a fundamental low-level vision task with significant real-world applications. The primary challenge lies in addressing diverse degradations within a single model. While current methods primarily exploit task prior information to guide the restoration models, they typically employ uniform multi-task learning, overlooking the heterogeneity in model optimization across different degradation tasks. To eliminate the bias, we propose a task-aware optimization strategy, that introduces adaptive task-specific regularization for multi-task image restoration learning. Specifically, our method dynamically weights and balances losses for different restoration tasks during training, encouraging the implementation of the most reasonable optimization route. In this way, we can achieve more robust and effective model training. Notably, our approach can serve as a plug-and-play strategy to enhance existing models without requiring modifications during inference. Extensive experiments in diverse all-in-one restoration settings demonstrate the superiority and generalization of our approach. For example, AirNet retrained with TUR achieves average improvements of 1.16 dB on three distinct tasks and 1.81 dB on five distinct all-in-one tasks. These results underscore TUR's effectiveness in advancing the SOTAs in all-in-one image restoration, paving the way for more robust and versatile image restoration. The code and results are available on the project page https://github.com/Aitical/TUR.