MR. Illuminate: Zero-Shot Low-Light Image Enhancement with Diffusion Prior

The primary axes of interest in low-light image enhancement (LLIE) are color constancy—ensuring consistent outputs across inputs of the same scene under varying illumination and noise—and generalization across diverse datasets. Existing methods, whether supervised, unsupervised, or zero-shot, rely on auxiliary loss functions and empirically selected hyperparameters, which yield strong results on the datasets used for evaluation but often exhibit limited generalization. To overcome these constraints, we propose MR. Illuminate (pronounced "Mister Illuminate"), the first deep learning-based solution for LLIE that requires no optimization and no degradation assumption. "MR." emphasizes our Modulate–Refine design: global illuminance and color are modulated via Adaptive Instance Normalization (AdaIN), while local structure and color are refined through self-attention features within a pre-trained diffusion model, taking a unique approach from prior methods. Extensive quantitative evaluations show that our approach surpasses SOTA methods on standard LLIE benchmarks, while qualitative results demonstrate improved color fidelity. Moreover, without any modification to our framework, our method achieves competitive results on the auto white balance (AWB) task, underscoring its strong generalization capability.