✨ ModalFormer: Multimodal Transformer for Low-Light Image Enhancement

Alexandru Brateanu, Raul Balmez, Ciprian Orhei, Codruta Ancuti, Cosmin Ancuti

Abstract

Low-light image enhancement (LLIE) is a fundamental yet challenging task due to the presence of noise, loss of detail, and poor contrast in images captured under insufficient lighting conditions. Recent methods often rely solely on pixel-level transformations of RGB images, neglecting the rich contextual information available from multiple visual modalities. In this paper, we present ModalFormer, the first large-scale multimodal framework for LLIE that fully exploits nine auxiliary modalities to achieve state-of-the-art performance. Our model comprises two main components: a Cross-modal Transformer (CM-T) designed to restore corrupted images while seamlessly integrating multimodal information, and multiple auxiliary subnetworks dedicated to multimodal feature reconstruction. Central to the CM-T is our novel Cross-modal Multi-headed Self-Attention mechanism (CM-MSA), which effectively fuses RGB data with modality-specific features—including deep feature embeddings, segmentation information, geometric cues, and color information—to generate information-rich hybrid attention maps. Extensive experiments on multiple benchmark datasets demonstrate ModalFormer’s state-of-the-art performance in LLIE. Pre-trained models and results are made available at https://github.com/albrateanu/ModalFormer

🆕 Updates

• 29.07.2025 🎉 The ModalFormer paper is now available! Check it out and explore our results and methodology.
• 28.07.2025 📦 Pre-trained models and test data published! ArXiv paper version and HuggingFace demo coming soon, stay tuned!

⚙️ Setup and Testing

For ease, utilize a Linux machine with CUDA-ready devices (GPUs).

To setup the environment, first run the provided setup script:

./environment_setup.sh
# or 
bash environment_setup.sh

Note: in case of difficulties, ensure environment_setup.sh is executable by running:

chmod +x environment_setup.sh

Give the setup a couple of minutes to run.

Please check out the GitHub repository for more implementation details.

📚 Citation

@misc{brateanu2025modalformer,
      title={ModalFormer: Multimodal Transformer for Low-Light Image Enhancement}, 
      author={Alexandru Brateanu and Raul Balmez and Ciprian Orhei and Codruta Ancuti and Cosmin Ancuti},
      year={2025},
      eprint={2507.20388},
      archivePrefix={arXiv},
      primaryClass={cs.CV},
      url={https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.20388}, 
}

🙏 Acknowledgements

We use this codebase as foundation for our implementation.

Paper: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.20388