BiDeMem: Bidirectional Degradation Memory for Explainable Image Restoration

Degradation-aware prompts, conditions, and latent priors are increasingly used in image restoration, yet they are usually judged by a single endpoint: whether the restored image obtains higher PSNR. This is a weak test of semantics. A condition can help by adding capacity, acting as a global correction bias, or exploiting dataset shortcuts, without becoming an interpretable degradation prior. We propose BiDeMem, a bidirectional degradation memory for explainable image restoration. A query built from restoration features and input statistics retrieves a compact top-k subset of memory slots. The