Image Restoration (IR) agents, leveraging multimodal large language models to perceive degradation and invoke restoration tools, have shown promise in automating IR tasks. However, existing IR agents typically lack an insight summarization mechanism for past interactions, which results in an exhaustive search for the optimal IR tool. To address this limitation, we propose a portrait-aware IR agent, dubbed PaAgent, which incorporates a self-evolving portrait bank for IR tools and Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) to select a suitable IR tool for input. Specifically, to construct and evolve the portrait bank, the PaAgent continuously enriches it by summarizing the characteristics of various IR tools with restored images, selected IR tools, and degraded images. In addition, the RAG is employed to select the optimal IR tool for the input image by retrieving relevant insights from the portrait bank. Furthermore, to enhance PaAgent's ability to perceive degradation in complex scenes, we propose a subjective-objective reinforcement learning strategy that considers both image quality scores and semantic insights in reward generation, which accurately provides the degradation information even under partial and non-uniform degradation. Extensive experiments across 8 IR benchmarks, covering six single-degradation and eight mixed-degradation scenarios, validate PaAgent's superiority in addressing complex IR tasks.
Overview of the proposed PaAgent architecture. (a) illustrates the entire workflow of PaAgent, which leverages Qwen3.5-9B for degradation perception and task recommendation, followed by an RAG module that queries the constructed tool portrait bank for optimal tool invocation. (b) depicts the evolution of the tool portrait bank, where interaction insights are summarized by Qwen3.5-Plus and stored for future utilization. (c) shows the SORL strategy, which integrates MLLM's insights and NR-IQA scores via Qwen3.5-Plus to generate reward signals, thereby driving the GRPO algorithm to fine-tune Qwen3.5-9B.
@article{wang2026agent,
title={{PaAgent}: Portrait-Aware Image Restoration Agent via Subjective-Objective Reinforcement Learningn},
author={Yijian Wang and Qingsen Yan and Jiantao Zhou and Duwei Dai and Wei Dong},
journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2603.17055},
year={2026},
}