LL-Bench: Rethinking Low-Level Vision Evaluation in the Era of Large-Scale Generative Models

Large-scale generative models have demonstrated remarkable capabilities across image generation and editing tasks. However, their performance in low-level vision tasks, which require pixel-wise control, remains insufficiently studied. To address this gap, we introduce \textbf{LL-Bench}, a comprehensive \textbf{Benchmark} for evaluating the capabilities of large-scale generative models on \textbf{L}ow-\textbf{L}evel vision tasks. The benchmark comprises 2,469 real-world degraded images covering 16 low-level degradation tasks, and 28,919 restored images produced by 10 state-of-the-art large-scale generative models and 21 conventional restoration models, which are annotated with 152,020 expert-level pairwise human preferences and 28,334 quality scores. Built upon LL-Bench, we present a systematic diagnosis that reveals the performance boundaries and unique failure modes of large-scale generative models across diverse low-level vision tasks, compared with conventional representative restoration approaches. Moreover, we investigate the effectiveness of current quality evaluation metrics on LL-Bench, which exhibit significant discrepancy with human ratings. To better align restored-image quality assessment with human preferences, we further propose \textbf{LL-Score}, an MLLM-based evaluator that captures both restoration quality and hallucination existence. Extensive experiments demonstrate that LL-score not only outperforms existing image quality assessment metrics, but also serves as a promising reward model for training generative models on low-level vision tasks.

A2BFR: Attribute-Aware Blind Face Restoration

Blind face restoration (BFR) aims to recover high-quality facial images from degraded inputs, yet its inherently ill-posed nature leads to ambiguous and uncontrollable solutions. Recent diffusion-based BFR methods improve perceptual quality but remain uncontrollable, whereas text-guided face editing enables attribute manipulation without reliable restoration. To address these issues, we propose A$^2$BFR, an attribute-aware blind face restoration framework that unifies high-fidelity reconstruction with prompt-controllable generation. Built upon a Diffusion Transformer backbone with unified image-text cross-modal attention, A$^2$BFR jointly conditions the denoising trajectory on both degraded inputs and textual prompts. To inject semantic priors, we introduce attribute-aware learning, which supervises denoising latents using facial attribute embeddings extracted by an attribute-aware encoder. To further enhance prompt controllability, we introduce semantic dual-training, which leverages the pairwise attribute variations in our newly curated AttrFace-90K dataset to enforce attribute discrimination while preserving fidelity. Extensive experiments demonstrate that A$^2$BFR achieves state-of-the-art performance in both restoration fidelity and instruction adherence, outperforming diffusion-based BFR baselines by -0.0467 LPIPS and +52.58% attribute accuracy, while enabling fine-grained, prompt-controllable restoration even under severe degradations.