Dynamic Time Step Prediction in Inverse Heat Dissipation for Blur-Like Image Restoration Tasks

arXiv:2610.03942v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: When using diffusion models to target image restoration problems, diffusion inversion is typically employed to retain relevant image information from the degraded images. Instead of inverting back to the initial time step (i.e., T), many methods invert to a pre-determined intermediate time step, in order to better preserve information from degraded source images. However, a pre-determined time step for inversion is not ideal for reconstruction, as a severely degraded image requires an earlier starting time step than a mildly degraded one. In addition, DDIM-based models corrupt the original signal by adding Gaussian noise, which can be mismatched to the nature of blur-like degradations, such as blur, haze, and low-light. To address these problems, we propose two solutions: (1) we adopt an alternative diffusion process, called the Inverse Heat Dissipation Model, that diffuses the input image by gradually blurring a data point (2) we propose to implement a time predictor to estimate the starting time step for the inversion, with the model learning to adapt to the degradation severity. Extensive experiments on standard benchmarks show that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance in both quantitative and qualitative evaluations, with excellent generalization to many restoration tasks.

Related

• Local Epistemic Uncertainty Guided Active Sampling for Plug-and-play Diffusive Image Restoration
• Inference-Time Search Using Side Information for Diffusion-Based Image Reconstruction
• DiffRGD: An Inference-Time Diffusion Guidance Through Riemannian Gradient Descent
• Stochastic Optimal Control Sampling for Diffusion Inverse Problems

Source: arXiv cs.CV | 2026-10-06