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State-of-the-art models for pixel-wise prediction tasks such as image restoration, image segmentation, or disparity estimation, involve several stages of data resampling, in which the resolution of feature maps is first reduced to aggregate information and then sequentially increased to generate a high-resolution output. Several previous works have investigated the effect of artifacts that are invoked during downsampling and diverse cures have been proposed that facilitate to improve prediction stability and even robustness for image classification. However, equally relevant, artifacts that arise during upsampling have been less discussed. This is significantly relevant as upsampling and downsampling approaches face fundamentally different challenges. While during downsampling, aliases and artifacts can be reduced by blurring feature maps, the emergence of fine details is crucial during upsampling. Blurring is therefore not an option and dedicated operations need to be considered. In this work, we are the first to explore the relevance of context during upsampling by employing convolutional upsampling operations with increasing kernel size while keeping the encoder unchanged. We find that increased kernel sizes can in general improve the prediction stability in tasks such as image restoration or image segmentation, while a block that allows for a combination of small-size kernels for fine details and large-size kernels for artifact removal and increased context yields the best results.
Following their success in visual recognition tasks, Vision Transformers(ViTs) are being increasingly employed for image restoration. As a few recent works claim that ViTs for image classification also have better robustness properties, we investigate whether the improved adversarial robustness of ViTs extends to image restoration. We consider the recently proposed Restormer model, as well as NAFNet and the "Baseline network" which are both simplified versions of a Restormer. We use Projected Gradient Descent (PGD) and CosPGD for our robustness evaluation. Our experiments are performed on real-world images from the GoPro dataset for image deblurring. Our analysis indicates that contrary to as advocated by ViTs in image classification works, these models are highly susceptible to adversarial attacks. We attempt to find an easy fix and improve their robustness through adversarial training. While this yields a significant increase in robustness for Restormer, results on other networks are less promising. Interestingly, we find that the design choices in NAFNet and Baselines, which were based on iid performance, and not on robust generalization, seem to be at odds with the model robustness.