cs.CVMay 30, 2026

VICR: Visual In-Context Restoration for Real-World Image Super-Resolution

Authors: Qichang ZhangHailong WangBaiang LiLinhao WangRong FuErkang ChengSimon James Fong

Organizations: Faculty of Science and Technology, University of Macau · 2Nullmax · 3Hefei University of Technology · 4Shandong Normal University

Abstract

Real-world image super-resolution (Real-ISR) requires balancing structural fidelity to degraded observations with realistic detail synthesis. However, existing generative Real-ISR methods often rely on entangled conditioning mechanisms, leading to structural drift or semantically inconsistent details. To address this issue, we propose Visual In-Context Restoration (VICR), a Diffusion Transformer (DiT)-based framework that formulates Real-ISR as image completion. Specifically, we introduce a decoupled visual prior injection mechanism that derives local and global cues from the low-quality (LQ) image: local cues help recover image structures and support high-frequency detail synthesis, while global cues guide overall generation and promote semantic consistency. For ambiguous regions under severe degradation, VICR employs an inference-time agent to refine semantic prompts using visual evidence from the LQ input while keeping model parameters fixed. Experiments show that VICR achieves state-of-the-art performance across multiple Real-ISR benchmarks with only 127M trainable parameters.

Explore similar work

CardsList