arXiv:2610.17991v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Recovering high-quality images from degraded underwater observations is crucial for underwater exploration. Polarization observations show promise as an effective source of complementary physical cues for recovering target radiance under clear-water conditions. However, existing methods have yet to jointly model raw intensity information and polarization cues to enable image restoration driven by an understanding of mixed underwater degradations. To overcome these limitations, we propose DORIS, a unified multimodal language-driven framework that jointly uses polarization and RGB information to generate textual descriptions of degradation types and severity levels through structured semantic instructions and enhances joint restoration representations under the guidance of degradation-aware semantic features to improve restoration robustness under mixed degradations. We further construct a new benchmark named MixPolar, which contains underwater images exhibiting real degradations and the corresponding annotations. It supports systematic evaluation of degradation perception, image restoration, and downstream task performance. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method effectively integrates polarization and RGB information, achieving competitive performance in degradation perception and image restoration.