BaryIR: Learning Multi-Source Unified Representation in Continuous Barycenter Space for Generalizable All-in-One Image Restoration

Despite remarkable advances made in all-in-one image restoration (AIR) for handling different types of degradations simultaneously, existing methods remain vulnerable to out-of-distribution degradations and images, limiting their real-world applicability. In this paper, we propose a multi-source representation learning framework BaryIR, which decomposes the latent space of multi-source degraded images into a continuous barycenter space for unified feature encoding and source-specific subspaces for specific semantic encoding. Specifically, we seek the multi-source unified representation by introducing a multi-source latent optimal transport barycenter problem, in which a continuous barycenter map is learned to transport the latent representations to the barycenter space. The transport cost is designed such that the representations from source-specific subspaces are contrasted with each other while maintaining orthogonality to those from the barycenter space. This enables BaryIR to learn compact representations with unified degradation-agnostic information from the barycenter space, as well as degradation-specific semantics from source-specific subspaces, capturing the inherent geometry of multi-source data manifold for generalizable AIR. Extensive experiments demonstrate that BaryIR achieves competitive performance compared to state-of-the-art all-in-one methods. Particularly, BaryIR exhibits superior generalization ability to real-world data and unseen degradations. The code will be publicly available at https://github.com/xl-tang3/BaryIR.