NAFNet — Nonlinear Activation Free Network for Image Restoration 🖼️❓ → 🖼️

NAFNet by Megvii Research is an efficient image restoration model that achieves state-of-the-art denoising and deblurring without nonlinear activation functions. Its simplified architecture delivers fast inference while maintaining high restoration quality.

What NAFNet does

• Image denoising — remove noise from photos taken in low light or high ISO
• Image deblurring — sharpen motion-blurred or out-of-focus images
• General restoration — clean up compressed, degraded, or noisy images

NAFNet's key insight is that removing traditional nonlinear activations (ReLU, GELU) from the network and replacing them with simple element-wise multiplication actually improves both speed and quality for restoration tasks.