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arxiv: 2605.18156 · v1 · pith:VNN3464Anew · submitted 2026-05-18 · 💻 cs.CV

Semi-LAR: Semi-supervised Contrastive Learning with Linear Attention for Removal of Nighttime Flares

Pith reviewed 2026-05-20 11:38 UTC · model grok-4.3

classification 💻 cs.CV
keywords semi-supervised learninglens flare removalcontrastive learningnighttime flarespseudo-label refinementimage restorationlinear attention
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The pith

A semi-supervised framework removes nighttime lens flares by refining pseudo-labels with quality assessment and applying flare-aware contrastive learning to unlabeled images.

A machine-rendered reading of the paper's core claim, the machinery that carries it, and where it could break.

The paper presents Semi-LAR, a semi-supervised method for removing lens flares in nighttime images that reduces dependence on large paired datasets. It maintains an adaptive pseudo-label repository that evaluates and updates labels using no-reference quality scores, momentum updates, and filtering to avoid error buildup during training. A dedicated contrastive loss then treats flare-affected inputs as negatives and operates at the patch level to build representations that separate flares from scene content. This joint handling of label reliability and discrimination allows the model to learn stably from unlabeled data and improves results across benchmarks in a way that works with different base models.

Core claim

The authors claim that jointly managing pseudo-label reliability via an adaptive repository (with no-reference quality assessment, momentum-based updates, and invalid label filtering) and representation discrimination via a flare-aware contrastive loss (treating flare-contaminated inputs as negatives for patch-level learning) enables stable semi-supervised training for nighttime flare removal, yielding consistent gains in performance and robustness on multiple benchmarks while remaining model-agnostic.

What carries the argument

The adaptive pseudo-label repository paired with the flare-aware contrastive loss, where the repository progressively refines pseudo supervision and the loss encourages discriminative features against flare patterns while aligning with reliable targets.

If this is right

  • Existing flare removal networks can be wrapped with this framework to gain performance from unlabeled nighttime images.
  • Training stability increases because poor pseudo-labels are detected and filtered before they compound.
  • The learned features become more robust to flare patterns while staying faithful to the underlying scene.
  • The approach works across different backbone architectures without requiring architecture-specific changes.

Where Pith is reading between the lines

These are editorial extensions of the paper, not claims the author makes directly.

  • The same quality-guided pseudo-label refinement could transfer to other low-light restoration tasks where paired data is expensive to create.
  • If linear attention is used in the underlying network as the title suggests, the method may support faster inference on edge devices for real-time flare removal.
  • Future work could test whether the contrastive component alone suffices when high-quality no-reference metrics are unavailable.

Load-bearing premise

No-reference quality assessment can reliably evaluate and progressively refine pseudo-labels to prevent error accumulation while the flare-aware contrastive loss produces discriminative representations without degrading scene fidelity.

What would settle it

Running the framework on a standard flare removal benchmark and finding no gain or a drop in standard metrics such as PSNR or visual quality relative to a fully supervised baseline trained on the same labeled data would falsify the claim.

Figures

Figures reproduced from arXiv: 2605.18156 by Kui Jiang, Wei Wang, Xiyu Zhu, Zhengguo Li.

Figure 1
Figure 1. Figure 1: Our approach bridges the gap to full supervision under limited labels and achieves further quality improvements when added to existing labeled baselines. ity but can also disrupt downstream vision tasks that rely on stable edges, consistent illumination, and accurate color statistics (Li et al., 2025b; Girshick et al., 2014). Similar nighttime visibility degradation has also been studied from the perspecti… view at source ↗
Figure 2
Figure 2. Figure 2: Overview of the proposed semi-supervised flare removal framework. The method adopts a teacher–student paradigm with EMA-based teacher updating. Labeled data are optimized with supervised reconstruction losses, while unlabeled data are processed using weak and strong augmentations. Teacher predictions are evaluated and selectively stored in a dependable repository to provide reliable pseudo supervision. The… view at source ↗
Figure 3
Figure 3. Figure 3: Overview of the proposed RaLiFormer architecture. (a) The hierarchical U-shaped network structure for image restoration. (b) The Directionally-Enhanced Spatial Module (DESM). (c) The Parallel Spatial-Channel Block (PSCBlock) as the basic building unit. (d) The Rank-Enhanced Linear Attention (ReLinA) module. (e) Detailed structure of the Channel Attention Block module. output yˆu = fθ(x s u ), while a relia… view at source ↗
Figure 4
Figure 4. Figure 4: Visual comparison of flare removal on real-world nighttime flare images. * indicates models trained with 8K labeled and 8K unlabeled data. Linear Attention (ReLinA), which enables efficient global context modeling with linear complexity. Given query, key, and value projections (Q, K, V), a positive feature mapping is applied: Q′ = ϕ(Q), K′ = ϕ(K), ϕ(x) = 1 + ELU(x). (6) The attention output is computed as:… view at source ↗
Figure 5
Figure 5. Figure 5: Ablation studies on the proposed method. W/O All W/O RG W/O CJ W/O GB Ours [PITH_FULL_IMAGE:figures/full_fig_p007_5.png] view at source ↗
Figure 6
Figure 6. Figure 6: Ablation studies on the impact of strong augmentations . learning methods trained on the full Flare7K++ dataset, such as U-Net (Ronneberger et al., 2015), Restormer (Zamir et al., 2022), Uformer (Wang et al., 2022), DeflareMamba (Huang et al., 2025), and SGSFT (Ma et al., 2025), which serve as strong upper-bound baselines. (3) Limited-supervision and semi-supervised methods, including limited-data variants… view at source ↗
Figure 7
Figure 7. Figure 7: Visual comparison of flare removal on flare-corrupted test. * indicates models trained with 8K labeled and 8K unlabeled data. 15 [PITH_FULL_IMAGE:figures/full_fig_p015_7.png] view at source ↗
Figure 8
Figure 8. Figure 8: Visual comparison of flare removal on FlareX test. * indicates models trained with 8K labeled and 8K unlabeled data. 16 [PITH_FULL_IMAGE:figures/full_fig_p016_8.png] view at source ↗
Figure 9
Figure 9. Figure 9: Visual comparison of flare removal on FlareReal600 test. * indicates models trained with 8K labeled and 8K unlabeled data. 17 [PITH_FULL_IMAGE:figures/full_fig_p017_9.png] view at source ↗
read the original abstract

Lens flare removal is challenging due to the large spatial extent of flare artifacts and their entanglement with scene structures, while existing methods heavily rely on large-scale paired data. We propose a semi-supervised flare removal framework that enables stable learning from unlabeled images by jointly addressing pseudo-label reliability and representation discrimination. We propose an adaptive pseudo-label repository that progressively refines pseudo supervision through no-reference quality assessment, momentum-based updates, and invalid label filtering, effectively mitigating error accumulation. Moreover, we propose a flare-aware contrastive loss that explicitly treats flare-contaminated inputs as negatives and performs patch-level contrastive learning, encouraging representations that are discriminative against flare patterns while remaining consistent with reliable pseudo targets. Extensive experiments on multiple flare benchmarks demonstrate that the proposed framework is model-agnostic and consistently improves performance and robustness.

Editorial analysis

A structured set of objections, weighed in public.

Desk editor's note, referee report, simulated authors' rebuttal, and a circularity audit. Tearing a paper down is the easy half of reading it; the pith above is the substance, this is the friction.

Referee Report

2 major / 2 minor

Summary. The paper claims to introduce Semi-LAR, a semi-supervised framework for nighttime lens flare removal that reduces reliance on paired data. It proposes an adaptive pseudo-label repository that progressively refines supervision from unlabeled images using no-reference quality assessment, momentum-based updates, and invalid label filtering to mitigate error accumulation. It further introduces a flare-aware contrastive loss that treats flare-contaminated inputs as negatives and performs patch-level contrastive learning to produce representations discriminative against flare patterns while remaining consistent with reliable pseudo targets. The framework is described as model-agnostic, with extensive experiments on multiple flare benchmarks claimed to show consistent improvements in performance and robustness.

Significance. If the central claims hold, the work could meaningfully advance semi-supervised approaches to image restoration tasks involving complex, spatially extended artifacts like nighttime flares. The joint focus on pseudo-label reliability and flare-specific representation discrimination via contrastive learning offers a practical way to leverage unlabeled data, and the model-agnostic design is a positive feature. Credit is given for attempting to create a stable learning pipeline without paired supervision, though the overall impact hinges on whether the no-reference IQA component reliably proxies true flare-removal quality.

major comments (2)
  1. [Abstract] Abstract: The central claim that the adaptive pseudo-label repository enables stable learning from unlabeled images by mitigating error accumulation rests on the assumption that no-reference quality assessment reliably ranks pseudo-labels by actual flare-removal fidelity. In nighttime scenes, where flares are spatially extended and entangled with scene content, this proxy may not correlate with ground-truth quality metrics; if misaligned, momentum updates would reinforce incorrect labels and the subsequent flare-aware contrastive loss would optimize for the wrong discrimination boundary. A correlation analysis or ablation comparing the chosen no-reference metric(s) against paired-data metrics (e.g., PSNR) on a validation subset is required to substantiate this load-bearing component.
  2. [Method] Method section describing the flare-aware contrastive loss: The claim that patch-level contrastive learning with flare-contaminated inputs as negatives produces discriminative representations without degrading scene fidelity lacks supporting detail on negative sampling strategy, temperature scaling, or how consistency with pseudo targets is enforced. Without these specifics or an ablation isolating the loss contribution, it is unclear whether the loss actually improves robustness or merely trades one form of artifact for another.
minor comments (2)
  1. [Abstract] The abstract states that the framework is 'model-agnostic' but provides no explicit description of which backbone architectures were tested or how the linear attention module integrates with them.
  2. [Abstract] No implementation details (e.g., specific no-reference IQA metrics employed, momentum coefficient values, or filtering thresholds) are mentioned in the abstract, which hinders immediate reproducibility.

Simulated Author's Rebuttal

2 responses · 0 unresolved

We thank the referee for the constructive comments, which help clarify key assumptions and implementation details in our semi-supervised framework. We address each major comment below and will revise the manuscript accordingly.

read point-by-point responses
  1. Referee: [Abstract] The central claim that the adaptive pseudo-label repository enables stable learning from unlabeled images by mitigating error accumulation rests on the assumption that no-reference quality assessment reliably ranks pseudo-labels by actual flare-removal fidelity. In nighttime scenes, where flares are spatially extended and entangled with scene content, this proxy may not correlate with ground-truth quality metrics; if misaligned, momentum updates would reinforce incorrect labels and the subsequent flare-aware contrastive loss would optimize for the wrong discrimination boundary. A correlation analysis or ablation comparing the chosen no-reference metric(s) against paired-data metrics (e.g., PSNR) on a validation subset is required to substantiate this load-bearing component.

    Authors: We agree that the correlation between no-reference quality assessment and true flare-removal fidelity (measured by paired metrics such as PSNR) is a critical assumption requiring explicit validation. In the revised manuscript, we will add a dedicated ablation study and correlation analysis performed on a held-out validation subset containing paired ground-truth data. This will quantify how well the chosen no-reference metric ranks pseudo-labels and will directly address concerns about potential misalignment or error reinforcement in the momentum updates. revision: yes

  2. Referee: [Method] The claim that patch-level contrastive learning with flare-contaminated inputs as negatives produces discriminative representations without degrading scene fidelity lacks supporting detail on negative sampling strategy, temperature scaling, or how consistency with pseudo targets is enforced. Without these specifics or an ablation isolating the loss contribution, it is unclear whether the loss actually improves robustness or merely trades one form of artifact for another.

    Authors: We acknowledge that the current description of the flare-aware contrastive loss requires additional implementation specifics for clarity and reproducibility. In the revised method section, we will expand the exposition to detail the negative sampling strategy (including how flare-contaminated patches are identified and selected as negatives), the temperature scaling hyperparameter, and the explicit consistency enforcement mechanism with reliable pseudo targets. We will also include a new ablation isolating the contribution of this loss to demonstrate its effect on robustness without introducing alternative artifacts. revision: yes

Circularity Check

0 steps flagged

No circularity: descriptive method proposal without self-referential reductions

full rationale

The provided abstract and manuscript description present a semi-supervised flare removal framework through natural-language claims about an adaptive pseudo-label repository (no-reference quality assessment, momentum updates, invalid label filtering) and a flare-aware contrastive loss. No equations, fitted parameters, or derivation chains appear that would reduce any prediction or result to quantities defined by the method itself. No self-citations are invoked as load-bearing uniqueness theorems or ansatzes. The central claims remain independent contributions rather than tautological restatements of inputs, making this a standard non-circular finding for a descriptive algorithmic proposal.

Axiom & Free-Parameter Ledger

0 free parameters · 0 axioms · 0 invented entities

Abstract provides no explicit free parameters, mathematical axioms, or newly postulated entities; all components are described at the level of algorithmic choices rather than formal assumptions.

pith-pipeline@v0.9.0 · 5668 in / 1092 out tokens · 42661 ms · 2026-05-20T11:38:56.811543+00:00 · methodology

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Reference graph

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