LearnIR: Learnable Posterior Sampling for Real-World Image Restoration

Yihang Bao, Zhen Huang, Shanyan Guan, Songlin Yang, Yanhao Ge, Wei Li, Bukun Huang, Zengmin Xu

International Conference on Learning Representations 2026 (ICLR 2026) Conference

Image restoration in real-world conditions is highly challenging due to heterogeneous degradations such as haze, noise, shadows, and blur. Existing diffusion-based methods remain limited: conditional generation struggles to balance fidelity and realism, inversion-based approaches accumulate errors, and posterior sampling requires a known forward operator that is rarely available. We introduce LearnIR, a learnable diffusion posterior sampling framework that eliminates this dependency by training a lightweight model to directly predict gradient correction distributions, enabling Diffusion Posterior Sampling Correction (DPSC) that maintains consistency with the true image distribution during sampling. In addition, a Dynamic Resolution Module (DRM) dynamically adjusts resolution to preserve global structures in early stages and refine fine textures later, while avoiding the need for a pretrained VAE. Experiments on ISTD, O-HAZE, HazyDet, REVIDE, and our newly constructed FaceShadow dataset show that LearnIR achieves state-of-the-art performance in PSNR, SSIM, and LPIPS.