A Minimalistic Unified Framework for Incremental Learning across Image Restoration Tasks

Existing research in low-level vision has shifted its focus from "one-by-one" task-specific methods to "all-in-one" multi-task unified architectures. However, current all-in-one image restoration approaches primarily aim to improve overall performance across a limited number of tasks. In contrast, how to incrementally add new image restoration capabilities on top of an existing model — that is, task-incremental learning — has been largely unexplored. To fill this research gap, we propose a minimalistic and universal paradigm for task-incremental learning called MINI. It addresses the problem of parameter interference across different tasks through a simple yet effective mechanism, enabling nearly forgetting-free task-incremental learning. Specifically, we design a special meta-convolution called MINI-Conv, which generates parameters solely through lightweight embeddings instead of complex convolutional networks or MLPs. This not only significantly reduces the number of parameters and computational overhead but also achieves complete parameter isolation across different tasks. Moreover, MINI-Conv can be seamlessly integrated as a plug-and-play replacement for any convolutional layer within existing backbone networks, endowing them with incremental learning capabilities. Therefore, our method is highly generalizable. Finally, we demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance compared to existing incremental learning approaches across five common image restoration tasks. Moreover, the near forgetting-free nature of our method makes it highly competitive even against all-in-one image restoration methods trained in a full-supervised manner. Our code is available at https://github.com.