SkillIR: Evolving Scene-Aware Skills for Agentic Image Restoration

Abstract

This paper studies agentic image restoration, in which multimodal agents coordinate specialized restoration tools to recover images affected by complex degradations. Existing restoration agents often derive complete tool-use plans from the original degraded image or retrieve previously successful trajectories, providing limited support for adapting individual actions to evolving intermediate restoration states. We find that accepted tool executions can change the residual degradation state and, consequently, the applicability of subsequent tools. To address this issue, we propose SkillIR, a skill-guided framework that represents restoration experience as degradation-centered action evidence rather than complete tool-use trajectories. SkillIR consolidates context-dependent action outcomes into scene-aware restoration skills that characterize applicable conditions, expected effects, and attributable failure cases. Instead of prescribing a complete restoration plan, the retrieved skills guide one bounded action at a time within a verified residual-state loop: each tool output is treated as a candidate, committed only after transition verification, and followed by reassessment of the active residual degradations. After each rollout, the resulting evidence is used to create, refine, or patch dynamic skills, enabling accumulated restoration experience to improve decision-making for subsequent inputs. Experiments on synthetic and real-world multi-degradation datasets demonstrate that SkillIR improves restoration quality and enables more reliable and effective tool use.