Enhancing Low-Light Images with Kolmogorov–Arnold Networks in Transformer Attention

Low-light image enhancement (LLIE) techniques improve the performance of image sensors by enhancing visibility and details in poorly lit environments and have significantly benefited from recent research into Transformer models. This work presents a novel Transformer attention mechanism inspired by the Kolmogorov–Arnold representation theorem, incorporating learnable non-linearity and multivariate function decomposition. This innovative mechanism is the foundation of KAN-T, our proposed Transformer network. By enhancing feature flexibility and enabling the model to capture broader contextual information, KAN-T achieves superior performance. Our comprehensive experiments, both quantitative and qualitative, demonstrate that the proposed method achieves state-of-the-art performance in low-light image enhancement, highlighting its effectiveness and wide-ranging applicability. The code will be released upon publication.