InstructRestore: Region-Customized Image Restoration with Human Instructions

Shuaizheng Liu, Jianqi Ma, Lingchen Sun, Xiangtao Kong, Lei Zhang

Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 38 (NeurIPS 2025) Main Conference Track

Despite the significant progress in diffusion prior-based image restoration for real-world scenarios, most existing methods apply uniform processing to the entire image, lacking the capability to perform region-customized image restoration according to user preferences. In this work, we propose a new framework, namely InstructRestore, to perform region-adjustable image restoration following human instructions. To achieve this, we first develop a data generation engine to produce training triplets, each consisting of a high-quality image, the target region description, and the corresponding region mask. With this engine and careful data screening, we construct a comprehensive dataset comprising 536,945 triplets to support the training and evaluation of this task. We then examine how to integrate the low-quality image features under the ControlNet architecture to adjust the degree of image details enhancement. Consequently, we develop a ControlNet-like model to identify the target region and allocate different integration scales to the target and surrounding regions, enabling region-customized image restoration that aligns with user instructions. Experimental results demonstrate that our proposed InstructRestore approach enables effective human-instructed image restoration, including restoration with controllable bokeh blur effects and region-specific restoration with continuous intensity control. Our work advances the investigation of interactive image restoration and enhancement techniques. Data, code, and models are publicly available at https://github.com/shuaizhengliu/InstructRestore.git.