PGDiff: Guiding Diffusion Models for Versatile Face Restoration via
  Partial Guidance
Peiqing Yang Shangchen Zhou Qingyi Tao Chen Change Loy
Exploiting pre-trained diffusion models for restoration has recently become a
favored alternative to the traditional task-specific training approach.
Previous works have achieved noteworthy success by limiting the solution space
using explicit degradation models. However, these methods often fall short when
faced with complex degradations as they generally cannot be precisely modeled.
In this paper, we propose PGDiff by introducing partial guidance, a fresh
perspective that is more adaptable to real-world degradations compared to
existing works. Rather than specifically defining the degradation process, our
approach models the desired properties, such as image structure and color
statistics of high-quality images, and applies this guidance during the reverse
diffusion process. These properties are readily available and make no
assumptions about the degradation process. When combined with a diffusion
prior, this partial guidance can deliver appealing results across a range of
restoration tasks. Additionally, PGDiff can be extended to handle composite
tasks by consolidating multiple high-quality image properties, achieved by
integrating the guidance from respective tasks. Experimental results
demonstrate that our method not only outperforms existing diffusion-prior-based
approaches but also competes favorably with task-specific models.