AI & ML Paradigm Shift

Proposed a test-time scaling paradigm for image restoration that allows compute-to-quality trade-offs during inference.

March 24, 2026

Original Paper

Tuning Real-World Image Restoration at Inference: A Test-Time Scaling Paradigm for Flow Matching Models

Purui Bai, Junxian Duan, Pin Wang, Jinhua Hao, Ming Sun, Chao Zhou, Huaibo Huang

arXiv · 2603.22027

The Takeaway

It brings the 'scaling at inference' trend from LLMs to computer vision, using a reward model to dynamically steer Flow Matching models. This enables significant performance gains on image restoration without the need for expensive model retraining.

From the abstract

Although diffusion-based real-world image restoration (Real-IR) has achieved remarkable progress, efficiently leveraging ultra-large-scale pre-trained text-to-image (T2I) models and fully exploiting their potential remain significant challenges. To address this issue, we propose ResFlow-Tuner, an image restoration framework based on the state-of-the-art flow matching model, FLUX.1-dev, which integrates unified multi-modal fusion (UMMF) with test-time scaling (TTS) to achieve unprecedented restor