ControlLight: Towards Controllable, Consistent, and Generalizable Low-Light Enhancement
2026-05-25 • Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
AI summaryⓘ
The authors created ControlLight, a new method to improve photos taken in very dark conditions. Unlike older methods that work with limited examples and only one way of improving images, ControlLight uses a large set of real dark images and lets users adjust how much they want to brighten the picture. It keeps the picture looking natural and consistent no matter the brightness level. Tests show it works better than previous methods and can handle many different real-world photos.
low-light enhancementdeep learningimage enhancementdatasetillumination controlflow matching lossimage structure preservationgeneralizationcontrollable enhancement
Authors
Yufeng Yang, Jianzhuang Liu, Jisheng Chu, Yuqi Peng, Xianfang Zeng, Jiancheng Huang, Shifeng Chen
Abstract
Existing deep learning-based low-light enhancement methods are typically trained on limited datasets with single enhancement targets, which restricts their generalization ability and controllability in real-world applications. To overcome these limitations, we propose ControlLight, a controllable, consistent, and generalizable framework for low-light enhancement. We first construct a large-scale dataset of real-world degraded images with continuous illumination-strength supervision. To further ensure consistent outputs under different control strengths, we introduce a misalignment-aware weighted flow matching loss that preserves image structure across continuous enhancement strengths. ControlLight allows users to edit real-world degraded low-light images toward satisfactory enhancement results by flexibly controlling the strength while preserving visual consistency and realism. Extensive experiments show that ControlLight achieves state-of-the-art performance against existing low-light enhancement approaches while demonstrating strong continuous controllability and generalization to real-world scenarios.