Despite significant progress has been made in image deraining, we note that most existing methods are often developed for only specific types of rain degradation and fail to generalize across diverse real-world rainy scenes. How to effectively model different rain degradations within a universal framework is important for real-world image deraining. In this paper, we propose UniRain, an effective unified image deraining framework capable of restoring images degraded by rain streak and raindrop under both daytime and nighttime conditions. To better enhance unified model generalization, we construct an intelligent retrieval augmented generation (RAG)-based dataset distillation pipeline that selects high-quality training samples from all public deraining datasets for better mixed training. Furthermore, we incorporate a simple yet effective multi-objective reweighted optimization strategy into the asymmetric mixture-of-experts (MoE) architecture to facilitate consistent performance and improve robustness across diverse scenes. Extensive experiments show that our framework performs favorably against the state-of-the-art models on our proposed benchmarks and multiple public datasets.
Figures & tables
Figure 1: Overview of motivation . (a) Rainy image samples from public datasets, illustrating the noticeable differences in data quality. (b) Directly merging existing synthetic and real datasets enlarges data volume, yet quality disparity hinders performance, as shown by PSNR results. (c) The loss curves of DRS, DRD, NRS, and NRD (denoting daytime/nighttime rain streaks and raindrops) show different convergence rates, leading to imbalance in unified training. (d) The PSNR curves indicate that the model tends to favor simpler degradations but struggles with complex ones.
Figure 2: Overall framework of UniRain . (Left) The RAG-based dataset distillation pipeline retrieves real rainy references consistent with the query image via multi-level similarity search and employs vision language models to evaluate its quality, thereby distilling reliable samples from public datasets. (Right) The asymmetric MoE architecture consists of soft-MoE encoder and hard-MoE decoder, optimized via the multi-objective reweighted strategy to achieve balanced learning and robust performance across multiple rain degradation types.
Datasets
RainRAG Dataset
DRS
DRD
NRS
NRD
Average
Methods
Venue
PSNR ↑
SSIM ↑
LPIPS ↓
PSNR ↑
SSIM ↑
LPIPS ↓
PSNR ↑
SSIM ↑
LPIPS ↓
PSNR ↑
SSIM ↑
LPIPS ↓
PSNR ↑
SSIM ↑
LPIPS ↓
LQ
-
23.79
0.7514
0.3207
20.79
0.7293
0.2433
26.89
0.8480
0.3583
21.05
0.5590
0.6130
23.13
0.7220
0.3839
PReNet [ 33 ]
CVPR 2019
26.73
0.8233
0.1885
21.45
0.7358
0.2697
32.85
0.9520
0.1957
24.29
0.8058
0.3751
26.33
0.8292
0.2572
RCDNet [ 39 ]
CVPR 2020
25.27
0.7949
0.2777
21.46
0.7295
0.2778
28.44
0.9070
0.2996
20.62
0.5832
0.5931
23.95
0.7537
0.3620
MPRNet [ 50 ]
CVPR 2021
27.99
0.8242
0.1701
22.50
0.7264
0.3308
33.75
0.9541
0.1834
24.46
0.8118
0.3634
27.17
0.8291
0.2619
Table 1: Quantitative evaluations on the proposed RainRAG dataset, where DRS, DRD, NRS, and NRD denote daytime rain streaks, daytime raindrops, nighttime rain streaks, and nighttime raindrops, respectively. The best and second-best values are bold and underlined .
Figure 3: Visual comparison of image deraining results on the RainRAG-NRS and RainDS-real-RD datasets. Zoom in for a better view.
Datasets
Metrics
PReNet [ 33 ]
RCDNet [ 39 ]
MPRNet [ 50 ]
IDT [ 44 ]
Restormer [ 51 ]
DRSformer [ 5 ]
RLP [ 53 ]
MSDT [ 4 ]
NeRD-Rain [ 7 ]
URIR [ 45 ]
UniRain (Ours)
RealRain-1k-L [ 26 ]
PSNR ↑
28.80
28.58
33.89
33.71
32.44
33.65
32.02
33.56
33.98
33.54
36.51
SSIM ↑
0.9307
0.9202
0.9701
0.9664
0.9644
0.9625
0.9558
0.9640
0.9710
0.9686
0.9778
RealRain-1k-H [ 26 ]
PSNR ↑
25.49
25.46
30.83
30.37
28.80
30.35
29.01
30.91
31.37
31.10
33.74
SSIM ↑
0.8820
0.8613
0.9542
0.9441
0.9389
0.9360
0.9309
0.9451
0.9583
0.9550
0.9672
RainDS-real-RD [ 31 ]
PSNR ↑
19.08
19.37
19.48
20.35
20.74
20.15
20.86
20.72
21.01
20.44
22.07
SSIM ↑
0.6020
0.5937
0.5957
0.6237
0.6346
0.6133
0.6136
0.6205
0.6155
0.5945
0.6436
Table 2: Quantitative evaluations on the real-world public benchmarks. The best and second-best values are bold and underlined .
Figure 4: Visual comparison of image restoration results on the real-world benchmark ( i.e. , WeatherBench [ 14 ] ). Compared to the state-of-the-art methods, our UniRain restores a high-quality image with clear details, even outperforming the GT by removing residual raindrops.
Methods
Restormer [ 51 ]
DRSformer [ 5 ]
NeRD-Rain [ 7 ]
UniRain (Ours)
FLOPs (G)
140.990
220.378
147.978
126.541
Params (M)
26.097
33.627
22.856
24.388
Table 3: Comparisons of model complexity against state-of-the-art methods. The size of the test image is 256×256 pixels.
Figure 5: Generalization results across multiple scenarios. Our method achieves the best restoration results in driving scenes (first row), UAV scenes (second row), and maritime scenes (third row).
Figure 6: Statistical ablation analysis of different combination strategies and their feature distributions across combinations.
Variants
only VLM
w/o Retrieval stage
w/o Generation stage
UniRain (Ours)
PSNR ↑
27.73
28.39
28.36
28.93
SSIM ↑
0.8358
0.8453
0.8425
0.8515
Table 4: Ablation analysis for RAG-based dataset distillation.
Base Models
Optimization Strategy
Metrics
Continual learning
Prompt learning
Ours
PSNR ↑
SSIM ↑
PIGWM [ 55 ]
✔
✗
✗
18.38
0.5758
✗
✗
✔
18.68
0.5880
PromptIR [ 29 ]
✗
✔
✗
18.58
0.5639
✗
✗
✔
19.55
0.5759
UniRain (Ours)
✔
✗
✗
18.92
0.5657
Table 5: Ablation analysis on various models using different optimizers, including our adaptive reweighting optimization strategy.
Figure 7: Loss and PSNR of the optimization strategy variants.
Variants
Encoder
Decoder
Metrics
hard-MoE
soft-MoE
hard-MoE
soft-MoE
PSNR ↑
SSIM ↑
Baseline
✗
✗
✗
✗
27.54
0.8442
Variant 1
✔
✗
✔
✗
28.39
0.8471
Variant 2
✔
✗
✗
✔
28.15
0.8485
Variant 3
✗
✔
✗
✔
27.91
0.8465
UniRain (Ours)
✗
✔
✔
✗
28.93
0.8515
Table 6: Ablation analysis of asymmetric MoE architecture. Experiments are conducted on the proposed RainRAG dataset.
Methods
TransWeather [ 38 ]
WGWS-Net [ 56 ]
Histoformer [ 37 ]
UniRain (Ours)
PSNR ↑
24.70
23.89
24.59
26.01
SSIM ↑
0.7931
0.7811
0.7976
0.8032
Table 7: Extension to all-in-one weather restoration on the WeatherBench dataset [ 14 ] , which contains real-world multi-weather degradations (rain, snow, and haze). Average results are reported.
Figure 8: Visual comparison of all-in-one weather restoration results ( e.g. , hazy input (first row) and snowy input (second row)).
While deep learning has advanced single-image deraining, existing models suffer from a fundamental limitation: they employ a static inference paradigm that fails to adapt to the complex, coupled degradations (e.g., noise artifacts, blur, and color deviation) of real-world rain. Consequently, restored images often exhibit residual artifacts and inconsistent perceptual quality. In this work, we present Derain-Agent, a plug-and-play refinement framework that transitions deraining from static processing to dynamic, agent-based restoration. Derain-Agent equips a base deraining model with two core capabilities: 1) a Planning Network that intelligently schedules an optimal sequence of restoration tools for each instance, and 2) a Strength Modulation mechanism that applies these tools with spatially adaptive intensity. This design enables precise, region-specific correction of residual errors without the prohibitive cost of iterative search. Our method demonstrates strong generalization, consistently boosting the performance of state-of-the-art deraining models on both synthetic and real-world benchmarks.
Unsupervised deraining has attracted attention for its ability to learn the real-world distribution of rain without paired supervision. However, the lack of strong constraints makes it difficult for the network to converge, especially with the complex diversity of rain degradation. A key motivation is that high-quality deraining results occasionally emerge during training, which can be leveraged to guide the optimization process. To overcome these challenges, we introduce RGSUD (Reward-Guided Self-Reinforcement Unsupervised Image Deraining), comprising two key stages: reward recycling and self-reinforcement (SR) training. For the former stage, we propose an Image Quality Assessment (IQA)-based dynamic reward recycling mechanism that selects optimal derained outputs during training and continuously collects high-quality deraining images. In latter stage, we incorporate these rewards into the model's optimization process, constraining the optimization space and improving alignment between derained outputs and clean images. By leveraging IQA-based self-reinforced loss and dynamically updated rewards, we enhance the quality of synthesized pseudo-paired data and stabilize the optimization. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method achieves SOTA performance across multiple datasets, including paired synthetic, paired real, and unpaired real images, outperforming existing unsupervised deraining approaches in both subjective and objective IQA metrics. Additionally, we show that the self-reinforcement strategy is adaptable to other unsupervised deraining methods and our deraining framework demonstrates strong generalization across existing supervised deraining networks.
Yinghao Chen, Yeying Jin, Xiang Chen +3
1National University of Defense Technology · National University of Singapore · 3Nanjing University of Science and Technology +2
When capturing images through glass surfaces or windshields on rainy days, raindrops and reflections frequently co-occur to significantly reduce the visibility of captured images. This practical problem lacks attention and needs to be resolved urgently. Prior de-raindrop, de-reflection, and all-in-one models have failed to address this composite degradation. To this end, we first formally define the unified removal of raindrops and reflections (UR3) task for the first time and construct a real-shot dataset, namely RainDrop and ReFlection (RDRF), which provides a new benchmark with substantial, high-quality, diverse image pairs. Then, we propose a novel diffusion-based framework (i.e., DiffUR3) with several target designs to address this challenging task. By leveraging the powerful generative prior, DiffUR3 successfully removes both types of degradations. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance on our benchmark and on challenging in-the-wild images.
Xingyu Liu, Zewei He, Yu Chen +4
Huanjiang Laboratory, Zhuji, China · School of Aeronautics and Astronautics, Zhejiang University, Hangzhou, China · Hangzhou Institute of Technology, Xidian University, Hangzhou, China +1