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SubscribeCo-Training Vision Language Models for Remote Sensing Multi-task Learning
With Transformers achieving outstanding performance on individual remote sensing (RS) tasks, we are now approaching the realization of a unified model that excels across multiple tasks through multi-task learning (MTL). Compared to single-task approaches, MTL methods offer improved generalization, enhanced scalability, and greater practical applicability. Recently, vision language models (VLMs) have achieved promising results in RS image understanding, grounding, and ultra-high-resolution (UHR) image reasoning, respectively. Moreover, the unified text-based interface demonstrates significant potential for MTL. Hence, in this work, we present RSCoVLM, a simple yet flexible VLM baseline for RS MTL. Firstly, we create the data curation engine, including data acquisition, offline processing and integrating, as well as online loading and weighting. This data engine effectively addresses complex RS data enviroment and generates flexible vision-language conversations. Furthermore, we propose a unified dynamic-resolution strategy to address the diverse image scales inherent in RS imagery. For UHR images, we introduce the Zoom-in Chain mechanism together with its corresponding dataset, LRS-VQA-Zoom. The strategies are flexible and effectively mitigate the computational burdens. Additionally, we significantly enhance the model's object detection capability and propose a novel evaluation protocol that ensures fair comparison between VLMs and conventional detection models. Extensive experiments demonstrate that RSCoVLM achieves state-of-the-art performance across diverse tasks, outperforming existing RS VLMs and even rivaling specialized expert models. All the training and evaluating tools, model weights, and datasets have been fully open-sourced to support reproducibility. We expect that this baseline will promote further progress toward general-purpose RS models.
UltraHR-100K: Enhancing UHR Image Synthesis with A Large-Scale High-Quality Dataset
Ultra-high-resolution (UHR) text-to-image (T2I) generation has seen notable progress. However, two key challenges remain : 1) the absence of a large-scale high-quality UHR T2I dataset, and (2) the neglect of tailored training strategies for fine-grained detail synthesis in UHR scenarios. To tackle the first challenge, we introduce UltraHR-100K, a high-quality dataset of 100K UHR images with rich captions, offering diverse content and strong visual fidelity. Each image exceeds 3K resolution and is rigorously curated based on detail richness, content complexity, and aesthetic quality. To tackle the second challenge, we propose a frequency-aware post-training method that enhances fine-detail generation in T2I diffusion models. Specifically, we design (i) Detail-Oriented Timestep Sampling (DOTS) to focus learning on detail-critical denoising steps, and (ii) Soft-Weighting Frequency Regularization (SWFR), which leverages Discrete Fourier Transform (DFT) to softly constrain frequency components, encouraging high-frequency detail preservation. Extensive experiments on our proposed UltraHR-eval4K benchmarks demonstrate that our approach significantly improves the fine-grained detail quality and overall fidelity of UHR image generation. The code is available at https://github.com/NJU-PCALab/UltraHR-100k{here}.
HRScene: How Far Are VLMs from Effective High-Resolution Image Understanding?
High-resolution image (HRI) understanding aims to process images with a large number of pixels, such as pathological images and agricultural aerial images, both of which can exceed 1 million pixels. Vision Large Language Models (VLMs) can allegedly handle HRIs, however, there is a lack of a comprehensive benchmark for VLMs to evaluate HRI understanding. To address this gap, we introduce HRScene, a novel unified benchmark for HRI understanding with rich scenes. HRScene incorporates 25 real-world datasets and 2 synthetic diagnostic datasets with resolutions ranging from 1,024 times 1,024 to 35,503 times 26,627. HRScene is collected and re-annotated by 10 graduate-level annotators, covering 25 scenarios, ranging from microscopic to radiology images, street views, long-range pictures, and telescope images. It includes HRIs of real-world objects, scanned documents, and composite multi-image. The two diagnostic evaluation datasets are synthesized by combining the target image with the gold answer and distracting images in different orders, assessing how well models utilize regions in HRI. We conduct extensive experiments involving 28 VLMs, including Gemini 2.0 Flash and GPT-4o. Experiments on HRScene show that current VLMs achieve an average accuracy of around 50% on real-world tasks, revealing significant gaps in HRI understanding. Results on synthetic datasets reveal that VLMs struggle to effectively utilize HRI regions, showing significant Regional Divergence and lost-in-middle, shedding light on future research.
Beyond LLaVA-HD: Diving into High-Resolution Large Multimodal Models
Seeing clearly with high resolution is a foundation of Large Multimodal Models (LMMs), which has been proven to be vital for visual perception and reasoning. Existing works usually employ a straightforward resolution upscaling method, where the image consists of global and local branches, with the latter being the sliced image patches but resized to the same resolution as the former. This means that higher resolution requires more local patches, resulting in exorbitant computational expenses, and meanwhile, the dominance of local image tokens may diminish the global context. In this paper, we dive into the problems and propose a new framework as well as an elaborate optimization strategy. Specifically, we extract contextual information from the global view using a mixture of adapters, based on the observation that different adapters excel at different tasks. With regard to local patches, learnable query embeddings are introduced to reduce image tokens, the most important tokens accounting for the user question will be further selected by a similarity-based selector. Our empirical results demonstrate a `less is more' pattern, where utilizing fewer but more informative local image tokens leads to improved performance. Besides, a significant challenge lies in the training strategy, as simultaneous end-to-end training of the global mining block and local compression block does not yield optimal results. We thus advocate for an alternating training way, ensuring balanced learning between global and local aspects. Finally, we also introduce a challenging dataset with high requirements for image detail, enhancing the training of the local compression layer. The proposed method, termed LMM with Sophisticated Tasks, Local image compression, and Mixture of global Experts (SliME), achieves leading performance across various benchmarks with only 2 million training data.
Human Vision Constrained Super-Resolution
Modern deep-learning super-resolution (SR) techniques process images and videos independently of the underlying content and viewing conditions. However, the sensitivity of the human visual system (HVS) to image details changes depending on the underlying image characteristics, such as spatial frequency, luminance, color, contrast, or motion; as well viewing condition aspects such as ambient lighting and distance to the display. This observation suggests that computational resources spent on up-sampling images/videos may be wasted whenever a viewer cannot resolve the synthesized details i.e the resolution of details exceeds the resolving capability of human vision. Motivated by this observation, we propose a human vision inspired and architecture-agnostic approach for controlling SR techniques to deliver visually optimal results while limiting computational complexity. Its core is an explicit Human Visual Processing Framework (HVPF) that dynamically and locally guides SR methods according to human sensitivity to specific image details and viewing conditions. We demonstrate the application of our framework in combination with network branching to improve the computational efficiency of SR methods. Quantitative and qualitative evaluations, including user studies, demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach in reducing FLOPS by factors of 2times and greater, without sacrificing perceived quality.
Scaling Vision Pre-Training to 4K Resolution
High-resolution perception of visual details is crucial for daily tasks. Current vision pre-training, however, is still limited to low resolutions (e.g., 378 x 378 pixels) due to the quadratic cost of processing larger images. We introduce PS3 that scales CLIP-style vision pre-training to 4K resolution with a near-constant cost. Instead of contrastive learning on global image representation, PS3 is pre-trained by selectively processing local regions and contrasting them with local detailed captions, enabling high-resolution representation learning with greatly reduced computational overhead. The pre-trained PS3 is able to both encode the global image at low resolution and selectively process local high-resolution regions based on their saliency or relevance to a text prompt. When applying PS3 to multi-modal LLM (MLLM), the resulting model, named VILA-HD, significantly improves high-resolution visual perception compared to baselines without high-resolution vision pre-training such as AnyRes and S^2 while using up to 4.3x fewer tokens. PS3 also unlocks appealing scaling properties of VILA-HD, including scaling up resolution for free and scaling up test-time compute for better performance. Compared to state of the arts, VILA-HD outperforms previous MLLMs such as NVILA and Qwen2-VL across multiple benchmarks and achieves better efficiency than latest token pruning approaches. Finally, we find current benchmarks do not require 4K-resolution perception, which motivates us to propose 4KPro, a new benchmark of image QA at 4K resolution, on which VILA-HD outperforms all previous MLLMs, including a 14.5% improvement over GPT-4o, and a 3.2% improvement and 2.96x speedup over Qwen2-VL.
UltraPixel: Advancing Ultra-High-Resolution Image Synthesis to New Peaks
Ultra-high-resolution image generation poses great challenges, such as increased semantic planning complexity and detail synthesis difficulties, alongside substantial training resource demands. We present UltraPixel, a novel architecture utilizing cascade diffusion models to generate high-quality images at multiple resolutions (e.g., 1K to 6K) within a single model, while maintaining computational efficiency. UltraPixel leverages semantics-rich representations of lower-resolution images in the later denoising stage to guide the whole generation of highly detailed high-resolution images, significantly reducing complexity. Furthermore, we introduce implicit neural representations for continuous upsampling and scale-aware normalization layers adaptable to various resolutions. Notably, both low- and high-resolution processes are performed in the most compact space, sharing the majority of parameters with less than 3% additional parameters for high-resolution outputs, largely enhancing training and inference efficiency. Our model achieves fast training with reduced data requirements, producing photo-realistic high-resolution images and demonstrating state-of-the-art performance in extensive experiments.
Scale-DiT: Ultra-High-Resolution Image Generation with Hierarchical Local Attention
Ultra-high-resolution text-to-image generation demands both fine-grained texture synthesis and globally coherent structure, yet current diffusion models remain constrained to sub-1K times 1K resolutions due to the prohibitive quadratic complexity of attention and the scarcity of native 4K training data. We present Scale-DiT, a new diffusion framework that introduces hierarchical local attention with low-resolution global guidance, enabling efficient, scalable, and semantically coherent image synthesis at ultra-high resolutions. Specifically, high-resolution latents are divided into fixed-size local windows to reduce attention complexity from quadratic to near-linear, while a low-resolution latent equipped with scaled positional anchors injects global semantics. A lightweight LoRA adaptation bridges global and local pathways during denoising, ensuring consistency across structure and detail. To maximize inference efficiency, we repermute token sequence in Hilbert curve order and implement a fused-kernel for skipping masked operations, resulting in a GPU-friendly design. Extensive experiments demonstrate that Scale-DiT achieves more than 2times faster inference and lower memory usage compared to dense attention baselines, while reliably scaling to 4K times 4K resolution without requiring additional high-resolution training data. On both quantitative benchmarks (FID, IS, CLIP Score) and qualitative comparisons, Scale-DiT delivers superior global coherence and sharper local detail, matching or outperforming state-of-the-art methods that rely on native 4K training. Taken together, these results highlight hierarchical local attention with guided low-resolution anchors as a promising and effective approach for advancing ultra-high-resolution image generation.
HIIF: Hierarchical Encoding based Implicit Image Function for Continuous Super-resolution
Recent advances in implicit neural representations (INRs) have shown significant promise in modeling visual signals for various low-vision tasks including image super-resolution (ISR). INR-based ISR methods typically learn continuous representations, providing flexibility for generating high-resolution images at any desired scale from their low-resolution counterparts. However, existing INR-based ISR methods utilize multi-layer perceptrons for parameterization in the network; this does not take account of the hierarchical structure existing in local sampling points and hence constrains the representation capability. In this paper, we propose a new Hierarchical encoding based Implicit Image Function for continuous image super-resolution, HIIF, which leverages a novel hierarchical positional encoding that enhances the local implicit representation, enabling it to capture fine details at multiple scales. Our approach also embeds a multi-head linear attention mechanism within the implicit attention network by taking additional non-local information into account. Our experiments show that, when integrated with different backbone encoders, HIIF outperforms the state-of-the-art continuous image super-resolution methods by up to 0.17dB in PSNR. The source code of HIIF will be made publicly available at www.github.com.
Real-Time Single Image and Video Super-Resolution Using an Efficient Sub-Pixel Convolutional Neural Network
Recently, several models based on deep neural networks have achieved great success in terms of both reconstruction accuracy and computational performance for single image super-resolution. In these methods, the low resolution (LR) input image is upscaled to the high resolution (HR) space using a single filter, commonly bicubic interpolation, before reconstruction. This means that the super-resolution (SR) operation is performed in HR space. We demonstrate that this is sub-optimal and adds computational complexity. In this paper, we present the first convolutional neural network (CNN) capable of real-time SR of 1080p videos on a single K2 GPU. To achieve this, we propose a novel CNN architecture where the feature maps are extracted in the LR space. In addition, we introduce an efficient sub-pixel convolution layer which learns an array of upscaling filters to upscale the final LR feature maps into the HR output. By doing so, we effectively replace the handcrafted bicubic filter in the SR pipeline with more complex upscaling filters specifically trained for each feature map, whilst also reducing the computational complexity of the overall SR operation. We evaluate the proposed approach using images and videos from publicly available datasets and show that it performs significantly better (+0.15dB on Images and +0.39dB on Videos) and is an order of magnitude faster than previous CNN-based methods.
Enhanced Deep Residual Networks for Single Image Super-Resolution
Recent research on super-resolution has progressed with the development of deep convolutional neural networks (DCNN). In particular, residual learning techniques exhibit improved performance. In this paper, we develop an enhanced deep super-resolution network (EDSR) with performance exceeding those of current state-of-the-art SR methods. The significant performance improvement of our model is due to optimization by removing unnecessary modules in conventional residual networks. The performance is further improved by expanding the model size while we stabilize the training procedure. We also propose a new multi-scale deep super-resolution system (MDSR) and training method, which can reconstruct high-resolution images of different upscaling factors in a single model. The proposed methods show superior performance over the state-of-the-art methods on benchmark datasets and prove its excellence by winning the NTIRE2017 Super-Resolution Challenge.
See More Details: Efficient Image Super-Resolution by Experts Mining
Reconstructing high-resolution (HR) images from low-resolution (LR) inputs poses a significant challenge in image super-resolution (SR). While recent approaches have demonstrated the efficacy of intricate operations customized for various objectives, the straightforward stacking of these disparate operations can result in a substantial computational burden, hampering their practical utility. In response, we introduce SeemoRe, an efficient SR model employing expert mining. Our approach strategically incorporates experts at different levels, adopting a collaborative methodology. At the macro scale, our experts address rank-wise and spatial-wise informative features, providing a holistic understanding. Subsequently, the model delves into the subtleties of rank choice by leveraging a mixture of low-rank experts. By tapping into experts specialized in distinct key factors crucial for accurate SR, our model excels in uncovering intricate intra-feature details. This collaborative approach is reminiscent of the concept of "see more", allowing our model to achieve an optimal performance with minimal computational costs in efficient settings. The source will be publicly made available at https://github.com/eduardzamfir/seemoredetails
GeoLLaVA-8K: Scaling Remote-Sensing Multimodal Large Language Models to 8K Resolution
Ultra-high-resolution (UHR) remote sensing (RS) imagery offers valuable data for Earth observation but pose challenges for existing multimodal foundation models due to two key bottlenecks: (1) limited availability of UHR training data, and (2) token explosion caused by the large image size. To address data scarcity, we introduce SuperRS-VQA (avg. 8,376times8,376) and HighRS-VQA (avg. 2,000times1,912), the highest-resolution vision-language datasets in RS to date, covering 22 real-world dialogue tasks. To mitigate token explosion, our pilot studies reveal significant redundancy in RS images: crucial information is concentrated in a small subset of object-centric tokens, while pruning background tokens (e.g., ocean or forest) can even improve performance. Motivated by these findings, we propose two strategies: Background Token Pruning and Anchored Token Selection, to reduce the memory footprint while preserving key semantics.Integrating these techniques, we introduce GeoLLaVA-8K, the first RS-focused multimodal large language model capable of handling inputs up to 8Ktimes8K resolution, built on the LLaVA framework. Trained on SuperRS-VQA and HighRS-VQA, GeoLLaVA-8K sets a new state-of-the-art on the XLRS-Bench.
State-of-the-Art Transformer Models for Image Super-Resolution: Techniques, Challenges, and Applications
Image Super-Resolution (SR) aims to recover a high-resolution image from its low-resolution counterpart, which has been affected by a specific degradation process. This is achieved by enhancing detail and visual quality. Recent advancements in transformer-based methods have remolded image super-resolution by enabling high-quality reconstructions surpassing previous deep-learning approaches like CNN and GAN-based. This effectively addresses the limitations of previous methods, such as limited receptive fields, poor global context capture, and challenges in high-frequency detail recovery. Additionally, the paper reviews recent trends and advancements in transformer-based SR models, exploring various innovative techniques and architectures that combine transformers with traditional networks to balance global and local contexts. These neoteric methods are critically analyzed, revealing promising yet unexplored gaps and potential directions for future research. Several visualizations of models and techniques are included to foster a holistic understanding of recent trends. This work seeks to offer a structured roadmap for researchers at the forefront of deep learning, specifically exploring the impact of transformers on super-resolution techniques.
UltraGen: High-Resolution Video Generation with Hierarchical Attention
Recent advances in video generation have made it possible to produce visually compelling videos, with wide-ranging applications in content creation, entertainment, and virtual reality. However, most existing diffusion transformer based video generation models are limited to low-resolution outputs (<=720P) due to the quadratic computational complexity of the attention mechanism with respect to the output width and height. This computational bottleneck makes native high-resolution video generation (1080P/2K/4K) impractical for both training and inference. To address this challenge, we present UltraGen, a novel video generation framework that enables i) efficient and ii) end-to-end native high-resolution video synthesis. Specifically, UltraGen features a hierarchical dual-branch attention architecture based on global-local attention decomposition, which decouples full attention into a local attention branch for high-fidelity regional content and a global attention branch for overall semantic consistency. We further propose a spatially compressed global modeling strategy to efficiently learn global dependencies, and a hierarchical cross-window local attention mechanism to reduce computational costs while enhancing information flow across different local windows. Extensive experiments demonstrate that UltraGen can effectively scale pre-trained low-resolution video models to 1080P and even 4K resolution for the first time, outperforming existing state-of-the-art methods and super-resolution based two-stage pipelines in both qualitative and quantitative evaluations.
MRI Super-Resolution with Deep Learning: A Comprehensive Survey
High-resolution (HR) magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) is crucial for many clinical and research applications. However, achieving it remains costly and constrained by technical trade-offs and experimental limitations. Super-resolution (SR) presents a promising computational approach to overcome these challenges by generating HR images from more affordable low-resolution (LR) scans, potentially improving diagnostic accuracy and efficiency without requiring additional hardware. This survey reviews recent advances in MRI SR techniques, with a focus on deep learning (DL) approaches. It examines DL-based MRI SR methods from the perspectives of computer vision, computational imaging, inverse problems, and MR physics, covering theoretical foundations, architectural designs, learning strategies, benchmark datasets, and performance metrics. We propose a systematic taxonomy to categorize these methods and present an in-depth study of both established and emerging SR techniques applicable to MRI, considering unique challenges in clinical and research contexts. We also highlight open challenges and directions that the community needs to address. Additionally, we provide a collection of essential open-access resources, tools, and tutorials, available on our GitHub: https://github.com/mkhateri/Awesome-MRI-Super-Resolution. IEEE keywords: MRI, Super-Resolution, Deep Learning, Computational Imaging, Inverse Problem, Survey.
Layered Diffusion Model for One-Shot High Resolution Text-to-Image Synthesis
We present a one-shot text-to-image diffusion model that can generate high-resolution images from natural language descriptions. Our model employs a layered U-Net architecture that simultaneously synthesizes images at multiple resolution scales. We show that this method outperforms the baseline of synthesizing images only at the target resolution, while reducing the computational cost per step. We demonstrate that higher resolution synthesis can be achieved by layering convolutions at additional resolution scales, in contrast to other methods which require additional models for super-resolution synthesis.
Super-Resolution Neural Operator
We propose Super-resolution Neural Operator (SRNO), a deep operator learning framework that can resolve high-resolution (HR) images at arbitrary scales from the low-resolution (LR) counterparts. Treating the LR-HR image pairs as continuous functions approximated with different grid sizes, SRNO learns the mapping between the corresponding function spaces. From the perspective of approximation theory, SRNO first embeds the LR input into a higher-dimensional latent representation space, trying to capture sufficient basis functions, and then iteratively approximates the implicit image function with a kernel integral mechanism, followed by a final dimensionality reduction step to generate the RGB representation at the target coordinates. The key characteristics distinguishing SRNO from prior continuous SR works are: 1) the kernel integral in each layer is efficiently implemented via the Galerkin-type attention, which possesses non-local properties in the spatial domain and therefore benefits the grid-free continuum; and 2) the multilayer attention architecture allows for the dynamic latent basis update, which is crucial for SR problems to "hallucinate" high-frequency information from the LR image. Experiments show that SRNO outperforms existing continuous SR methods in terms of both accuracy and running time. Our code is at https://github.com/2y7c3/Super-Resolution-Neural-Operator
Creatively Upscaling Images with Global-Regional Priors
Contemporary diffusion models show remarkable capability in text-to-image generation, while still being limited to restricted resolutions (e.g., 1,024 X 1,024). Recent advances enable tuning-free higher-resolution image generation by recycling pre-trained diffusion models and extending them via regional denoising or dilated sampling/convolutions. However, these models struggle to simultaneously preserve global semantic structure and produce creative regional details in higher-resolution images. To address this, we present C-Upscale, a new recipe of tuning-free image upscaling that pivots on global-regional priors derived from given global prompt and estimated regional prompts via Multimodal LLM. Technically, the low-frequency component of low-resolution image is recognized as global structure prior to encourage global semantic consistency in high-resolution generation. Next, we perform regional attention control to screen cross-attention between global prompt and each region during regional denoising, leading to regional attention prior that alleviates object repetition issue. The estimated regional prompts containing rich descriptive details further act as regional semantic prior to fuel the creativity of regional detail generation. Both quantitative and qualitative evaluations demonstrate that our C-Upscale manages to generate ultra-high-resolution images (e.g., 4,096 X 4,096 and 8,192 X 8,192) with higher visual fidelity and more creative regional details.
Towards Efficient and Scale-Robust Ultra-High-Definition Image Demoireing
With the rapid development of mobile devices, modern widely-used mobile phones typically allow users to capture 4K resolution (i.e., ultra-high-definition) images. However, for image demoireing, a challenging task in low-level vision, existing works are generally carried out on low-resolution or synthetic images. Hence, the effectiveness of these methods on 4K resolution images is still unknown. In this paper, we explore moire pattern removal for ultra-high-definition images. To this end, we propose the first ultra-high-definition demoireing dataset (UHDM), which contains 5,000 real-world 4K resolution image pairs, and conduct a benchmark study on current state-of-the-art methods. Further, we present an efficient baseline model ESDNet for tackling 4K moire images, wherein we build a semantic-aligned scale-aware module to address the scale variation of moire patterns. Extensive experiments manifest the effectiveness of our approach, which outperforms state-of-the-art methods by a large margin while being much more lightweight. Code and dataset are available at https://xinyu-andy.github.io/uhdm-page.
CoSeR: Bridging Image and Language for Cognitive Super-Resolution
Existing super-resolution (SR) models primarily focus on restoring local texture details, often neglecting the global semantic information within the scene. This oversight can lead to the omission of crucial semantic details or the introduction of inaccurate textures during the recovery process. In our work, we introduce the Cognitive Super-Resolution (CoSeR) framework, empowering SR models with the capacity to comprehend low-resolution images. We achieve this by marrying image appearance and language understanding to generate a cognitive embedding, which not only activates prior information from large text-to-image diffusion models but also facilitates the generation of high-quality reference images to optimize the SR process. To further improve image fidelity, we propose a novel condition injection scheme called "All-in-Attention", consolidating all conditional information into a single module. Consequently, our method successfully restores semantically correct and photorealistic details, demonstrating state-of-the-art performance across multiple benchmarks. Code: https://github.com/VINHYU/CoSeR
Greedy Growing Enables High-Resolution Pixel-Based Diffusion Models
We address the long-standing problem of how to learn effective pixel-based image diffusion models at scale, introducing a remarkably simple greedy growing method for stable training of large-scale, high-resolution models. without the needs for cascaded super-resolution components. The key insight stems from careful pre-training of core components, namely, those responsible for text-to-image alignment {\it vs.} high-resolution rendering. We first demonstrate the benefits of scaling a {\it Shallow UNet}, with no down(up)-sampling enc(dec)oder. Scaling its deep core layers is shown to improve alignment, object structure, and composition. Building on this core model, we propose a greedy algorithm that grows the architecture into high-resolution end-to-end models, while preserving the integrity of the pre-trained representation, stabilizing training, and reducing the need for large high-resolution datasets. This enables a single stage model capable of generating high-resolution images without the need of a super-resolution cascade. Our key results rely on public datasets and show that we are able to train non-cascaded models up to 8B parameters with no further regularization schemes. Vermeer, our full pipeline model trained with internal datasets to produce 1024x1024 images, without cascades, is preferred by 44.0% vs. 21.4% human evaluators over SDXL.
Screentone-Aware Manga Super-Resolution Using DeepLearning
Manga, as a widely beloved form of entertainment around the world, have shifted from paper to electronic screens with the proliferation of handheld devices. However, as the demand for image quality increases with screen development, high-quality images can hinder transmission and affect the viewing experience. Traditional vectorization methods require a significant amount of manual parameter adjustment to process screentone. Using deep learning, lines and screentone can be automatically extracted and image resolution can be enhanced. Super-resolution can convert low-resolution images to high-resolution images while maintaining low transmission rates and providing high-quality results. However, traditional Super Resolution methods for improving manga resolution do not consider the meaning of screentone density, resulting in changes to screentone density and loss of meaning. In this paper, we aims to address this issue by first classifying the regions and lines of different screentone in the manga using deep learning algorithm, then using corresponding super-resolution models for quality enhancement based on the different classifications of each block, and finally combining them to obtain images that maintain the meaning of screentone and lines in the manga while improving image resolution.
ScaleCrafter: Tuning-free Higher-Resolution Visual Generation with Diffusion Models
In this work, we investigate the capability of generating images from pre-trained diffusion models at much higher resolutions than the training image sizes. In addition, the generated images should have arbitrary image aspect ratios. When generating images directly at a higher resolution, 1024 x 1024, with the pre-trained Stable Diffusion using training images of resolution 512 x 512, we observe persistent problems of object repetition and unreasonable object structures. Existing works for higher-resolution generation, such as attention-based and joint-diffusion approaches, cannot well address these issues. As a new perspective, we examine the structural components of the U-Net in diffusion models and identify the crucial cause as the limited perception field of convolutional kernels. Based on this key observation, we propose a simple yet effective re-dilation that can dynamically adjust the convolutional perception field during inference. We further propose the dispersed convolution and noise-damped classifier-free guidance, which can enable ultra-high-resolution image generation (e.g., 4096 x 4096). Notably, our approach does not require any training or optimization. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our approach can address the repetition issue well and achieve state-of-the-art performance on higher-resolution image synthesis, especially in texture details. Our work also suggests that a pre-trained diffusion model trained on low-resolution images can be directly used for high-resolution visual generation without further tuning, which may provide insights for future research on ultra-high-resolution image and video synthesis.
Accelerating the Super-Resolution Convolutional Neural Network
As a successful deep model applied in image super-resolution (SR), the Super-Resolution Convolutional Neural Network (SRCNN) has demonstrated superior performance to the previous hand-crafted models either in speed and restoration quality. However, the high computational cost still hinders it from practical usage that demands real-time performance (24 fps). In this paper, we aim at accelerating the current SRCNN, and propose a compact hourglass-shape CNN structure for faster and better SR. We re-design the SRCNN structure mainly in three aspects. First, we introduce a deconvolution layer at the end of the network, then the mapping is learned directly from the original low-resolution image (without interpolation) to the high-resolution one. Second, we reformulate the mapping layer by shrinking the input feature dimension before mapping and expanding back afterwards. Third, we adopt smaller filter sizes but more mapping layers. The proposed model achieves a speed up of more than 40 times with even superior restoration quality. Further, we present the parameter settings that can achieve real-time performance on a generic CPU while still maintaining good performance. A corresponding transfer strategy is also proposed for fast training and testing across different upscaling factors.
Dragonfly: Multi-Resolution Zoom Supercharges Large Visual-Language Model
Recent advances in large multimodal models (LMMs) suggest that higher image resolution enhances the fine-grained understanding of image details, crucial for tasks such as visual commonsense reasoning and analyzing biomedical images. However, increasing input resolution poses two main challenges: 1) It extends the context length required by the language model, leading to inefficiencies and hitting the model's context limit; 2) It increases the complexity of visual features, necessitating more training data or more complex architecture. We introduce Dragonfly, a new LMM architecture that enhances fine-grained visual understanding and reasoning about image regions to address these challenges. Dragonfly employs two key strategies: multi-resolution visual encoding and zoom-in patch selection. These strategies allow the model to process high-resolution images efficiently while maintaining reasonable context length. Our experiments on eight popular benchmarks demonstrate that Dragonfly achieves competitive or better performance compared to other architectures, highlighting the effectiveness of our design. Additionally, we finetuned Dragonfly on biomedical instructions, achieving state-of-the-art results on multiple biomedical tasks requiring fine-grained visual understanding, including 92.3% accuracy on the Path-VQA dataset (compared to 83.3% for Med-Gemini) and the highest reported results on biomedical image captioning. To support model training, we curated a visual instruction-tuning dataset with 5.5 million image-instruction samples in the general domain and 1.4 million samples in the biomedical domain. We also conducted ablation studies to characterize the impact of various architectural designs and image resolutions, providing insights for future research on visual instruction alignment. The codebase and model are available at https://github.com/togethercomputer/Dragonfly.
HF-Diff: High-Frequency Perceptual Loss and Distribution Matching for One-Step Diffusion-Based Image Super-Resolution
Although recent diffusion-based single-step super-resolution methods achieve better performance as compared to SinSR, they are computationally complex. To improve the performance of SinSR, we investigate preserving the high-frequency detail features during super-resolution (SR) because the downgraded images lack detailed information. For this purpose, we introduce a high-frequency perceptual loss by utilizing an invertible neural network (INN) pretrained on the ImageNet dataset. Different feature maps of pretrained INN produce different high-frequency aspects of an image. During the training phase, we impose to preserve the high-frequency features of super-resolved and ground truth (GT) images that improve the SR image quality during inference. Furthermore, we also utilize the Jenson-Shannon divergence between GT and SR images in the pretrained DINO-v2 embedding space to match their distribution. By introducing the high- frequency preserving loss and distribution matching constraint in the single-step diffusion-based SR (HF-Diff), we achieve a state-of-the-art CLIPIQA score in the benchmark RealSR, RealSet65, DIV2K-Val, and ImageNet datasets. Furthermore, the experimental results in several datasets demonstrate that our high-frequency perceptual loss yields better SR image quality than LPIPS and VGG-based perceptual losses. Our code will be released at https://github.com/shoaib-sami/HF-Diff.
InternLM-XComposer2-4KHD: A Pioneering Large Vision-Language Model Handling Resolutions from 336 Pixels to 4K HD
The Large Vision-Language Model (LVLM) field has seen significant advancements, yet its progression has been hindered by challenges in comprehending fine-grained visual content due to limited resolution. Recent efforts have aimed to enhance the high-resolution understanding capabilities of LVLMs, yet they remain capped at approximately 1500 x 1500 pixels and constrained to a relatively narrow resolution range. This paper represents InternLM-XComposer2-4KHD, a groundbreaking exploration into elevating LVLM resolution capabilities up to 4K HD (3840 x 1600) and beyond. Concurrently, considering the ultra-high resolution may not be necessary in all scenarios, it supports a wide range of diverse resolutions from 336 pixels to 4K standard, significantly broadening its scope of applicability. Specifically, this research advances the patch division paradigm by introducing a novel extension: dynamic resolution with automatic patch configuration. It maintains the training image aspect ratios while automatically varying patch counts and configuring layouts based on a pre-trained Vision Transformer (ViT) (336 x 336), leading to dynamic training resolution from 336 pixels to 4K standard. Our research demonstrates that scaling training resolution up to 4K HD leads to consistent performance enhancements without hitting the ceiling of potential improvements. InternLM-XComposer2-4KHD shows superb capability that matches or even surpasses GPT-4V and Gemini Pro in 10 of the 16 benchmarks. The InternLM-XComposer2-4KHD model series with 7B parameters are publicly available at https://github.com/InternLM/InternLM-XComposer.
LLaVA-UHD: an LMM Perceiving Any Aspect Ratio and High-Resolution Images
Visual encoding constitutes the basis of large multimodal models (LMMs) in understanding the visual world. Conventional LMMs process images in fixed sizes and limited resolutions, while recent explorations in this direction are limited in adaptivity, efficiency, and even correctness. In this work, we first take GPT-4V and LLaVA-1.5 as representative examples and expose systematic flaws rooted in their visual encoding strategy. To address the challenges, we present LLaVA-UHD, a large multimodal model that can efficiently perceive images in any aspect ratio and high resolution. LLaVA-UHD includes three key components: (1) An image modularization strategy that divides native-resolution images into smaller variable-sized slices for efficient and extensible encoding, (2) a compression module that further condenses image tokens from visual encoders, and (3) a spatial schema to organize slice tokens for LLMs. Comprehensive experiments show that LLaVA-UHD outperforms established LMMs trained with 2-3 orders of magnitude more data on 9 benchmarks. Notably, our model built on LLaVA-1.5 336x336 supports 6 times larger (i.e., 672x1088) resolution images using only 94% inference computation, and achieves 6.4 accuracy improvement on TextVQA. Moreover, the model can be efficiently trained in academic settings, within 23 hours on 8 A100 GPUs (vs. 26 hours of LLaVA-1.5). We make the data and code publicly available at https://github.com/thunlp/LLaVA-UHD.
MegaSR: Mining Customized Semantics and Expressive Guidance for Image Super-Resolution
Pioneering text-to-image (T2I) diffusion models have ushered in a new era of real-world image super-resolution (Real-ISR), significantly enhancing the visual perception of reconstructed images. However, existing methods typically integrate uniform abstract textual semantics across all blocks, overlooking the distinct semantic requirements at different depths and the fine-grained, concrete semantics inherently present in the images themselves. Moreover, relying solely on a single type of guidance further disrupts the consistency of reconstruction. To address these issues, we propose MegaSR, a novel framework that mines customized block-wise semantics and expressive guidance for diffusion-based ISR. Compared to uniform textual semantics, MegaSR enables flexible adaptation to multi-granularity semantic awareness by dynamically incorporating image attributes at each block. Furthermore, we experimentally identify HED edge maps, depth maps, and segmentation maps as the most expressive guidance, and propose a multi-stage aggregation strategy to modulate them into the T2I models. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superiority of MegaSR in terms of semantic richness and structural consistency.
Inf-DiT: Upsampling Any-Resolution Image with Memory-Efficient Diffusion Transformer
Diffusion models have shown remarkable performance in image generation in recent years. However, due to a quadratic increase in memory during generating ultra-high-resolution images (e.g. 4096*4096), the resolution of generated images is often limited to 1024*1024. In this work. we propose a unidirectional block attention mechanism that can adaptively adjust the memory overhead during the inference process and handle global dependencies. Building on this module, we adopt the DiT structure for upsampling and develop an infinite super-resolution model capable of upsampling images of various shapes and resolutions. Comprehensive experiments show that our model achieves SOTA performance in generating ultra-high-resolution images in both machine and human evaluation. Compared to commonly used UNet structures, our model can save more than 5x memory when generating 4096*4096 images. The project URL is https://github.com/THUDM/Inf-DiT.
Ultra-Resolution Adaptation with Ease
Text-to-image diffusion models have achieved remarkable progress in recent years. However, training models for high-resolution image generation remains challenging, particularly when training data and computational resources are limited. In this paper, we explore this practical problem from two key perspectives: data and parameter efficiency, and propose a set of key guidelines for ultra-resolution adaptation termed URAE. For data efficiency, we theoretically and empirically demonstrate that synthetic data generated by some teacher models can significantly promote training convergence. For parameter efficiency, we find that tuning minor components of the weight matrices outperforms widely-used low-rank adapters when synthetic data are unavailable, offering substantial performance gains while maintaining efficiency. Additionally, for models leveraging guidance distillation, such as FLUX, we show that disabling classifier-free guidance, i.e., setting the guidance scale to 1 during adaptation, is crucial for satisfactory performance. Extensive experiments validate that URAE achieves comparable 2K-generation performance to state-of-the-art closed-source models like FLUX1.1 [Pro] Ultra with only 3K samples and 2K iterations, while setting new benchmarks for 4K-resolution generation. Codes are available https://github.com/Huage001/URAE{here}.
ImagePairs: Realistic Super Resolution Dataset via Beam Splitter Camera Rig
Super Resolution is the problem of recovering a high-resolution image from a single or multiple low-resolution images of the same scene. It is an ill-posed problem since high frequency visual details of the scene are completely lost in low-resolution images. To overcome this, many machine learning approaches have been proposed aiming at training a model to recover the lost details in the new scenes. Such approaches include the recent successful effort in utilizing deep learning techniques to solve super resolution problem. As proven, data itself plays a significant role in the machine learning process especially deep learning approaches which are data hungry. Therefore, to solve the problem, the process of gathering data and its formation could be equally as vital as the machine learning technique used. Herein, we are proposing a new data acquisition technique for gathering real image data set which could be used as an input for super resolution, noise cancellation and quality enhancement techniques. We use a beam-splitter to capture the same scene by a low resolution camera and a high resolution camera. Since we also release the raw images, this large-scale dataset could be used for other tasks such as ISP generation. Unlike current small-scale dataset used for these tasks, our proposed dataset includes 11,421 pairs of low-resolution high-resolution images of diverse scenes. To our knowledge this is the most complete dataset for super resolution, ISP and image quality enhancement. The benchmarking result shows how the new dataset can be successfully used to significantly improve the quality of real-world image super resolution.
Monkey: Image Resolution and Text Label Are Important Things for Large Multi-modal Models
Large Multimodal Models have demonstrated impressive capabilities in understanding general vision-language tasks. However, due to the limitation of supported input resolution (e.g., 448 x 448) as well as the inexhaustive description of the training image-text pair, these models often encounter challenges when dealing with intricate scene understandings and narratives. Here we address the problem by proposing the Monkey. Our contributions are two-fold: 1) without pretraining from the start, our method can be built upon an existing vision encoder (e.g., vit-BigHuge) to effectively improve the input resolution capacity up to 896 x 1344 pixels; 2) we propose a multi-level description generation method, which automatically provides rich information that can guide model to learn contextual association between scenes and objects. Our extensive testing across more than 16 distinct datasets reveals that Monkey achieves consistently competitive performance over the existing LMMs on fundamental tasks, such as Image Captioning, General Visual Question Answering (VQA), and Document-oriented VQA. Models, interactive demo, and the source code are provided at the following https://github.com/Yuliang-Liu/Monkey.
CATANet: Efficient Content-Aware Token Aggregation for Lightweight Image Super-Resolution
Transformer-based methods have demonstrated impressive performance in low-level visual tasks such as Image Super-Resolution (SR). However, its computational complexity grows quadratically with the spatial resolution. A series of works attempt to alleviate this problem by dividing Low-Resolution images into local windows, axial stripes, or dilated windows. SR typically leverages the redundancy of images for reconstruction, and this redundancy appears not only in local regions but also in long-range regions. However, these methods limit attention computation to content-agnostic local regions, limiting directly the ability of attention to capture long-range dependency. To address these issues, we propose a lightweight Content-Aware Token Aggregation Network (CATANet). Specifically, we propose an efficient Content-Aware Token Aggregation module for aggregating long-range content-similar tokens, which shares token centers across all image tokens and updates them only during the training phase. Then we utilize intra-group self-attention to enable long-range information interaction. Moreover, we design an inter-group cross-attention to further enhance global information interaction. The experimental results show that, compared with the state-of-the-art cluster-based method SPIN, our method achieves superior performance, with a maximum PSNR improvement of 0.33dB and nearly double the inference speed.
Image Super-Resolution Using Deep Convolutional Networks
We propose a deep learning method for single image super-resolution (SR). Our method directly learns an end-to-end mapping between the low/high-resolution images. The mapping is represented as a deep convolutional neural network (CNN) that takes the low-resolution image as the input and outputs the high-resolution one. We further show that traditional sparse-coding-based SR methods can also be viewed as a deep convolutional network. But unlike traditional methods that handle each component separately, our method jointly optimizes all layers. Our deep CNN has a lightweight structure, yet demonstrates state-of-the-art restoration quality, and achieves fast speed for practical on-line usage. We explore different network structures and parameter settings to achieve trade-offs between performance and speed. Moreover, we extend our network to cope with three color channels simultaneously, and show better overall reconstruction quality.
AutoLUT: LUT-Based Image Super-Resolution with Automatic Sampling and Adaptive Residual Learning
In recent years, the increasing popularity of Hi-DPI screens has driven a rising demand for high-resolution images. However, the limited computational power of edge devices poses a challenge in deploying complex super-resolution neural networks, highlighting the need for efficient methods. While prior works have made significant progress, they have not fully exploited pixel-level information. Moreover, their reliance on fixed sampling patterns limits both accuracy and the ability to capture fine details in low-resolution images. To address these challenges, we introduce two plug-and-play modules designed to capture and leverage pixel information effectively in Look-Up Table (LUT) based super-resolution networks. Our method introduces Automatic Sampling (AutoSample), a flexible LUT sampling approach where sampling weights are automatically learned during training to adapt to pixel variations and expand the receptive field without added inference cost. We also incorporate Adaptive Residual Learning (AdaRL) to enhance inter-layer connections, enabling detailed information flow and improving the network's ability to reconstruct fine details. Our method achieves significant performance improvements on both MuLUT and SPF-LUT while maintaining similar storage sizes. Specifically, for MuLUT, we achieve a PSNR improvement of approximately +0.20 dB improvement on average across five datasets. For SPF-LUT, with more than a 50% reduction in storage space and about a 2/3 reduction in inference time, our method still maintains performance comparable to the original. The code is available at https://github.com/SuperKenVery/AutoLUT.
Frequency-Domain Refinement with Multiscale Diffusion for Super Resolution
The performance of single image super-resolution depends heavily on how to generate and complement high-frequency details to low-resolution images. Recently, diffusion-based models exhibit great potential in generating high-quality images for super-resolution tasks. However, existing models encounter difficulties in directly predicting high-frequency information of wide bandwidth by solely utilizing the high-resolution ground truth as the target for all sampling timesteps. To tackle this problem and achieve higher-quality super-resolution, we propose a novel Frequency Domain-guided multiscale Diffusion model (FDDiff), which decomposes the high-frequency information complementing process into finer-grained steps. In particular, a wavelet packet-based frequency complement chain is developed to provide multiscale intermediate targets with increasing bandwidth for reverse diffusion process. Then FDDiff guides reverse diffusion process to progressively complement the missing high-frequency details over timesteps. Moreover, we design a multiscale frequency refinement network to predict the required high-frequency components at multiple scales within one unified network. Comprehensive evaluations on popular benchmarks are conducted, and demonstrate that FDDiff outperforms prior generative methods with higher-fidelity super-resolution results.
FastSR-NeRF: Improving NeRF Efficiency on Consumer Devices with A Simple Super-Resolution Pipeline
Super-resolution (SR) techniques have recently been proposed to upscale the outputs of neural radiance fields (NeRF) and generate high-quality images with enhanced inference speeds. However, existing NeRF+SR methods increase training overhead by using extra input features, loss functions, and/or expensive training procedures such as knowledge distillation. In this paper, we aim to leverage SR for efficiency gains without costly training or architectural changes. Specifically, we build a simple NeRF+SR pipeline that directly combines existing modules, and we propose a lightweight augmentation technique, random patch sampling, for training. Compared to existing NeRF+SR methods, our pipeline mitigates the SR computing overhead and can be trained up to 23x faster, making it feasible to run on consumer devices such as the Apple MacBook. Experiments show our pipeline can upscale NeRF outputs by 2-4x while maintaining high quality, increasing inference speeds by up to 18x on an NVIDIA V100 GPU and 12.8x on an M1 Pro chip. We conclude that SR can be a simple but effective technique for improving the efficiency of NeRF models for consumer devices.
Feature Modulation Transformer: Cross-Refinement of Global Representation via High-Frequency Prior for Image Super-Resolution
Transformer-based methods have exhibited remarkable potential in single image super-resolution (SISR) by effectively extracting long-range dependencies. However, most of the current research in this area has prioritized the design of transformer blocks to capture global information, while overlooking the importance of incorporating high-frequency priors, which we believe could be beneficial. In our study, we conducted a series of experiments and found that transformer structures are more adept at capturing low-frequency information, but have limited capacity in constructing high-frequency representations when compared to their convolutional counterparts. Our proposed solution, the cross-refinement adaptive feature modulation transformer (CRAFT), integrates the strengths of both convolutional and transformer structures. It comprises three key components: the high-frequency enhancement residual block (HFERB) for extracting high-frequency information, the shift rectangle window attention block (SRWAB) for capturing global information, and the hybrid fusion block (HFB) for refining the global representation. Our experiments on multiple datasets demonstrate that CRAFT outperforms state-of-the-art methods by up to 0.29dB while using fewer parameters. The source code will be made available at: https://github.com/AVC2-UESTC/CRAFT-SR.git.
InfiMM-HD: A Leap Forward in High-Resolution Multimodal Understanding
Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have experienced significant advancements recently. Nevertheless, challenges persist in the accurate recognition and comprehension of intricate details within high-resolution images. Despite being indispensable for the development of robust MLLMs, this area remains underinvestigated. To tackle this challenge, our work introduces InfiMM-HD, a novel architecture specifically designed for processing images of different resolutions with low computational overhead. This innovation facilitates the enlargement of MLLMs to higher-resolution capabilities. InfiMM-HD incorporates a cross-attention module and visual windows to reduce computation costs. By integrating this architectural design with a four-stage training pipeline, our model attains improved visual perception efficiently and cost-effectively. Empirical study underscores the robustness and effectiveness of InfiMM-HD, opening new avenues for exploration in related areas. Codes and models can be found at https://huggingface.co/Infi-MM/infimm-hd
UltraImage: Rethinking Resolution Extrapolation in Image Diffusion Transformers
Recent image diffusion transformers achieve high-fidelity generation, but struggle to generate images beyond these scales, suffering from content repetition and quality degradation. In this work, we present UltraImage, a principled framework that addresses both issues. Through frequency-wise analysis of positional embeddings, we identify that repetition arises from the periodicity of the dominant frequency, whose period aligns with the training resolution. We introduce a recursive dominant frequency correction to constrain it within a single period after extrapolation. Furthermore, we find that quality degradation stems from diluted attention and thus propose entropy-guided adaptive attention concentration, which assigns higher focus factors to sharpen local attention for fine detail and lower ones to global attention patterns to preserve structural consistency. Experiments show that UltraImage consistently outperforms prior methods on Qwen-Image and Flux (around 4K) across three generation scenarios, reducing repetition and improving visual fidelity. Moreover, UltraImage can generate images up to 6K*6K without low-resolution guidance from a training resolution of 1328p, demonstrating its extreme extrapolation capability. Project page is available at https://thu-ml.github.io/ultraimage.github.io/{https://thu-ml.github.io/ultraimage.github.io/}.
Deep High-Resolution Representation Learning for Visual Recognition
High-resolution representations are essential for position-sensitive vision problems, such as human pose estimation, semantic segmentation, and object detection. Existing state-of-the-art frameworks first encode the input image as a low-resolution representation through a subnetwork that is formed by connecting high-to-low resolution convolutions in series (e.g., ResNet, VGGNet), and then recover the high-resolution representation from the encoded low-resolution representation. Instead, our proposed network, named as High-Resolution Network (HRNet), maintains high-resolution representations through the whole process. There are two key characteristics: (i) Connect the high-to-low resolution convolution streams in parallel; (ii) Repeatedly exchange the information across resolutions. The benefit is that the resulting representation is semantically richer and spatially more precise. We show the superiority of the proposed HRNet in a wide range of applications, including human pose estimation, semantic segmentation, and object detection, suggesting that the HRNet is a stronger backbone for computer vision problems. All the codes are available at~{https://github.com/HRNet}.
HiT-SR: Hierarchical Transformer for Efficient Image Super-Resolution
Transformers have exhibited promising performance in computer vision tasks including image super-resolution (SR). However, popular transformer-based SR methods often employ window self-attention with quadratic computational complexity to window sizes, resulting in fixed small windows with limited receptive fields. In this paper, we present a general strategy to convert transformer-based SR networks to hierarchical transformers (HiT-SR), boosting SR performance with multi-scale features while maintaining an efficient design. Specifically, we first replace the commonly used fixed small windows with expanding hierarchical windows to aggregate features at different scales and establish long-range dependencies. Considering the intensive computation required for large windows, we further design a spatial-channel correlation method with linear complexity to window sizes, efficiently gathering spatial and channel information from hierarchical windows. Extensive experiments verify the effectiveness and efficiency of our HiT-SR, and our improved versions of SwinIR-Light, SwinIR-NG, and SRFormer-Light yield state-of-the-art SR results with fewer parameters, FLOPs, and faster speeds (sim7times).
Ship in Sight: Diffusion Models for Ship-Image Super Resolution
In recent years, remarkable advancements have been achieved in the field of image generation, primarily driven by the escalating demand for high-quality outcomes across various image generation subtasks, such as inpainting, denoising, and super resolution. A major effort is devoted to exploring the application of super-resolution techniques to enhance the quality of low-resolution images. In this context, our method explores in depth the problem of ship image super resolution, which is crucial for coastal and port surveillance. We investigate the opportunity given by the growing interest in text-to-image diffusion models, taking advantage of the prior knowledge that such foundation models have already learned. In particular, we present a diffusion-model-based architecture that leverages text conditioning during training while being class-aware, to best preserve the crucial details of the ships during the generation of the super-resoluted image. Since the specificity of this task and the scarcity availability of off-the-shelf data, we also introduce a large labeled ship dataset scraped from online ship images, mostly from ShipSpotting\url{www.shipspotting.com} website. Our method achieves more robust results than other deep learning models previously employed for super resolution, as proven by the multiple experiments performed. Moreover, we investigate how this model can benefit downstream tasks, such as classification and object detection, thus emphasizing practical implementation in a real-world scenario. Experimental results show flexibility, reliability, and impressive performance of the proposed framework over state-of-the-art methods for different tasks. The code is available at: https://github.com/LuigiSigillo/ShipinSight .
QuickSRNet: Plain Single-Image Super-Resolution Architecture for Faster Inference on Mobile Platforms
In this work, we present QuickSRNet, an efficient super-resolution architecture for real-time applications on mobile platforms. Super-resolution clarifies, sharpens, and upscales an image to higher resolution. Applications such as gaming and video playback along with the ever-improving display capabilities of TVs, smartphones, and VR headsets are driving the need for efficient upscaling solutions. While existing deep learning-based super-resolution approaches achieve impressive results in terms of visual quality, enabling real-time DL-based super-resolution on mobile devices with compute, thermal, and power constraints is challenging. To address these challenges, we propose QuickSRNet, a simple yet effective architecture that provides better accuracy-to-latency trade-offs than existing neural architectures for single-image super resolution. We present training tricks to speed up existing residual-based super-resolution architectures while maintaining robustness to quantization. Our proposed architecture produces 1080p outputs via 2x upscaling in 2.2 ms on a modern smartphone, making it ideal for high-fps real-time applications.
FouriScale: A Frequency Perspective on Training-Free High-Resolution Image Synthesis
In this study, we delve into the generation of high-resolution images from pre-trained diffusion models, addressing persistent challenges, such as repetitive patterns and structural distortions, that emerge when models are applied beyond their trained resolutions. To address this issue, we introduce an innovative, training-free approach FouriScale from the perspective of frequency domain analysis. We replace the original convolutional layers in pre-trained diffusion models by incorporating a dilation technique along with a low-pass operation, intending to achieve structural consistency and scale consistency across resolutions, respectively. Further enhanced by a padding-then-crop strategy, our method can flexibly handle text-to-image generation of various aspect ratios. By using the FouriScale as guidance, our method successfully balances the structural integrity and fidelity of generated images, achieving an astonishing capacity of arbitrary-size, high-resolution, and high-quality generation. With its simplicity and compatibility, our method can provide valuable insights for future explorations into the synthesis of ultra-high-resolution images. The code will be released at https://github.com/LeonHLJ/FouriScale.
JAFAR: Jack up Any Feature at Any Resolution
Foundation Vision Encoders have become essential for a wide range of dense vision tasks. However, their low-resolution spatial feature outputs necessitate feature upsampling to produce the high-resolution modalities required for downstream tasks. In this work, we introduce JAFAR, a lightweight and flexible feature upsampler that enhances the spatial resolution of visual features from any Foundation Vision Encoder to an arbitrary target resolution. JAFAR employs an attention-based module designed to promote semantic alignment between high-resolution queries, derived from low-level image features, and semantically enriched low-resolution keys, using Spatial Feature Transform (SFT) modulation. Notably, despite the absence of high-resolution supervision, we demonstrate that learning at low upsampling ratios and resolutions generalizes remarkably well to significantly higher output scales. Extensive experiments show that JAFAR effectively recovers fine-grained spatial details and consistently outperforms existing feature upsampling methods across a diverse set of downstream tasks. Project page at https://jafar-upsampler.github.io
Arbitrary-Scale Image Generation and Upsampling using Latent Diffusion Model and Implicit Neural Decoder
Super-resolution (SR) and image generation are important tasks in computer vision and are widely adopted in real-world applications. Most existing methods, however, generate images only at fixed-scale magnification and suffer from over-smoothing and artifacts. Additionally, they do not offer enough diversity of output images nor image consistency at different scales. Most relevant work applied Implicit Neural Representation (INR) to the denoising diffusion model to obtain continuous-resolution yet diverse and high-quality SR results. Since this model operates in the image space, the larger the resolution of image is produced, the more memory and inference time is required, and it also does not maintain scale-specific consistency. We propose a novel pipeline that can super-resolve an input image or generate from a random noise a novel image at arbitrary scales. The method consists of a pretrained auto-encoder, a latent diffusion model, and an implicit neural decoder, and their learning strategies. The proposed method adopts diffusion processes in a latent space, thus efficient, yet aligned with output image space decoded by MLPs at arbitrary scales. More specifically, our arbitrary-scale decoder is designed by the symmetric decoder w/o up-scaling from the pretrained auto-encoder, and Local Implicit Image Function (LIIF) in series. The latent diffusion process is learnt by the denoising and the alignment losses jointly. Errors in output images are backpropagated via the fixed decoder, improving the quality of output images. In the extensive experiments using multiple public benchmarks on the two tasks i.e. image super-resolution and novel image generation at arbitrary scales, the proposed method outperforms relevant methods in metrics of image quality, diversity and scale consistency. It is significantly better than the relevant prior-art in the inference speed and memory usage.
Towards Bidirectional Arbitrary Image Rescaling: Joint Optimization and Cycle Idempotence
Deep learning based single image super-resolution models have been widely studied and superb results are achieved in upscaling low-resolution images with fixed scale factor and downscaling degradation kernel. To improve real world applicability of such models, there are growing interests to develop models optimized for arbitrary upscaling factors. Our proposed method is the first to treat arbitrary rescaling, both upscaling and downscaling, as one unified process. Using joint optimization of both directions, the proposed model is able to learn upscaling and downscaling simultaneously and achieve bidirectional arbitrary image rescaling. It improves the performance of current arbitrary upscaling models by a large margin while at the same time learns to maintain visual perception quality in downscaled images. The proposed model is further shown to be robust in cycle idempotence test, free of severe degradations in reconstruction accuracy when the downscaling-to-upscaling cycle is applied repetitively. This robustness is beneficial for image rescaling in the wild when this cycle could be applied to one image for multiple times. It also performs well on tests with arbitrary large scales and asymmetric scales, even when the model is not trained with such tasks. Extensive experiments are conducted to demonstrate the superior performance of our model.
UltraVideo: High-Quality UHD Video Dataset with Comprehensive Captions
The quality of the video dataset (image quality, resolution, and fine-grained caption) greatly influences the performance of the video generation model. The growing demand for video applications sets higher requirements for high-quality video generation models. For example, the generation of movie-level Ultra-High Definition (UHD) videos and the creation of 4K short video content. However, the existing public datasets cannot support related research and applications. In this paper, we first propose a high-quality open-sourced UHD-4K (22.4\% of which are 8K) text-to-video dataset named UltraVideo, which contains a wide range of topics (more than 100 kinds), and each video has 9 structured captions with one summarized caption (average of 824 words). Specifically, we carefully design a highly automated curation process with four stages to obtain the final high-quality dataset: i) collection of diverse and high-quality video clips. ii) statistical data filtering. iii) model-based data purification. iv) generation of comprehensive, structured captions. In addition, we expand Wan to UltraWan-1K/-4K, which can natively generate high-quality 1K/4K videos with more consistent text controllability, demonstrating the effectiveness of our data curation.We believe that this work can make a significant contribution to future research on UHD video generation. UltraVideo dataset and UltraWan models are available at https://xzc-zju.github.io/projects/UltraVideo.
Efficient-VQGAN: Towards High-Resolution Image Generation with Efficient Vision Transformers
Vector-quantized image modeling has shown great potential in synthesizing high-quality images. However, generating high-resolution images remains a challenging task due to the quadratic computational overhead of the self-attention process. In this study, we seek to explore a more efficient two-stage framework for high-resolution image generation with improvements in the following three aspects. (1) Based on the observation that the first quantization stage has solid local property, we employ a local attention-based quantization model instead of the global attention mechanism used in previous methods, leading to better efficiency and reconstruction quality. (2) We emphasize the importance of multi-grained feature interaction during image generation and introduce an efficient attention mechanism that combines global attention (long-range semantic consistency within the whole image) and local attention (fined-grained details). This approach results in faster generation speed, higher generation fidelity, and improved resolution. (3) We propose a new generation pipeline incorporating autoencoding training and autoregressive generation strategy, demonstrating a better paradigm for image synthesis. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superiority of our approach in high-quality and high-resolution image reconstruction and generation.
DiffuseHigh: Training-free Progressive High-Resolution Image Synthesis through Structure Guidance
Recent surge in large-scale generative models has spurred the development of vast fields in computer vision. In particular, text-to-image diffusion models have garnered widespread adoption across diverse domain due to their potential for high-fidelity image generation. Nonetheless, existing large-scale diffusion models are confined to generate images of up to 1K resolution, which is far from meeting the demands of contemporary commercial applications. Directly sampling higher-resolution images often yields results marred by artifacts such as object repetition and distorted shapes. Addressing the aforementioned issues typically necessitates training or fine-tuning models on higher resolution datasets. However, this undertaking poses a formidable challenge due to the difficulty in collecting large-scale high-resolution contents and substantial computational resources. While several preceding works have proposed alternatives, they often fail to produce convincing results. In this work, we probe the generative ability of diffusion models at higher resolution beyond its original capability and propose a novel progressive approach that fully utilizes generated low-resolution image to guide the generation of higher resolution image. Our method obviates the need for additional training or fine-tuning which significantly lowers the burden of computational costs. Extensive experiments and results validate the efficiency and efficacy of our method. Project page: https://yhyun225.github.io/DiffuseHigh/
HiDiffusion: Unlocking High-Resolution Creativity and Efficiency in Low-Resolution Trained Diffusion Models
We introduce HiDiffusion, a tuning-free framework comprised of Resolution-Aware U-Net (RAU-Net) and Modified Shifted Window Multi-head Self-Attention (MSW-MSA) to enable pretrained large text-to-image diffusion models to efficiently generate high-resolution images (e.g. 1024times1024) that surpass the training image resolution. Pretrained diffusion models encounter unreasonable object duplication in generating images beyond the training image resolution. We attribute it to the mismatch between the feature map size of high-resolution images and the receptive field of U-Net's convolution. To address this issue, we propose a simple yet scalable method named RAU-Net. RAU-Net dynamically adjusts the feature map size to match the convolution's receptive field in the deep block of U-Net. Another obstacle in high-resolution synthesis is the slow inference speed of U-Net. Our observations reveal that the global self-attention in the top block, which exhibits locality, however, consumes the majority of computational resources. To tackle this issue, we propose MSW-MSA. Unlike previous window attention mechanisms, our method uses a much larger window size and dynamically shifts windows to better accommodate diffusion models. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our HiDiffusion can scale diffusion models to generate 1024times1024, 2048times2048, or even 4096times4096 resolution images, while simultaneously reducing inference time by 40\%-60\%, achieving state-of-the-art performance on high-resolution image synthesis. The most significant revelation of our work is that a pretrained diffusion model on low-resolution images is scalable for high-resolution generation without further tuning. We hope this revelation can provide insights for future research on the scalability of diffusion models.
SuperInpaint: Learning Detail-Enhanced Attentional Implicit Representation for Super-resolutional Image Inpainting
In this work, we introduce a challenging image restoration task, referred to as SuperInpaint, which aims to reconstruct missing regions in low-resolution images and generate completed images with arbitrarily higher resolutions. We have found that this task cannot be effectively addressed by stacking state-of-the-art super-resolution and image inpainting methods as they amplify each other's flaws, leading to noticeable artifacts. To overcome these limitations, we propose the detail-enhanced attentional implicit representation (DEAR) that can achieve SuperInpaint with a single model, resulting in high-quality completed images with arbitrary resolutions. Specifically, we use a deep convolutional network to extract the latent embedding of an input image and then enhance the high-frequency components of the latent embedding via an adaptive high-pass filter. This leads to detail-enhanced semantic embedding. We further feed the semantic embedding into an unmask-attentional module that suppresses embeddings from ineffective masked pixels. Additionally, we extract a pixel-wise importance map that indicates which pixels should be used for image reconstruction. Given the coordinates of a pixel we want to reconstruct, we first collect its neighboring pixels in the input image and extract their detail-enhanced semantic embeddings, unmask-attentional semantic embeddings, importance values, and spatial distances to the desired pixel. Then, we feed all the above terms into an implicit representation and generate the color of the specified pixel. To evaluate our method, we extend three existing datasets for this new task and build 18 meaningful baselines using SOTA inpainting and super-resolution methods. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that our method outperforms all existing methods by a significant margin on four widely used metrics.
Enriched CNN-Transformer Feature Aggregation Networks for Super-Resolution
Recent transformer-based super-resolution (SR) methods have achieved promising results against conventional CNN-based methods. However, these approaches suffer from essential shortsightedness created by only utilizing the standard self-attention-based reasoning. In this paper, we introduce an effective hybrid SR network to aggregate enriched features, including local features from CNNs and long-range multi-scale dependencies captured by transformers. Specifically, our network comprises transformer and convolutional branches, which synergetically complement each representation during the restoration procedure. Furthermore, we propose a cross-scale token attention module, allowing the transformer branch to exploit the informative relationships among tokens across different scales efficiently. Our proposed method achieves state-of-the-art SR results on numerous benchmark datasets.
DocPedia: Unleashing the Power of Large Multimodal Model in the Frequency Domain for Versatile Document Understanding
This work presents DocPedia, a novel large multimodal model (LMM) for versatile OCR-free document understanding, capable of parsing images up to 2,560times2,560 resolution. Unlike existing work either struggle with high-resolution documents or give up the large language model thus vision or language ability constrained, our DocPedia directly processes visual input in the frequency domain rather than the pixel space. The unique characteristic enables DocPedia to capture a greater amount of visual and textual information using a limited number of visual tokens. To consistently enhance both perception and comprehension abilities of our model, we develop a dual-stage training strategy and enrich instructions/annotations of all training tasks covering multiple document types. Extensive quantitative and qualitative experiments conducted on various publicly available benchmarks confirm the mutual benefits of jointly learning perception and comprehension tasks. The results provide further evidence of the effectiveness and superior performance of our DocPedia over other methods.
Zoomed In, Diffused Out: Towards Local Degradation-Aware Multi-Diffusion for Extreme Image Super-Resolution
Large-scale, pre-trained Text-to-Image (T2I) diffusion models have gained significant popularity in image generation tasks and have shown unexpected potential in image Super-Resolution (SR). However, most existing T2I diffusion models are trained with a resolution limit of 512x512, making scaling beyond this resolution an unresolved but necessary challenge for image SR. In this work, we introduce a novel approach that, for the first time, enables these models to generate 2K, 4K, and even 8K images without any additional training. Our method leverages MultiDiffusion, which distributes the generation across multiple diffusion paths to ensure global coherence at larger scales, and local degradation-aware prompt extraction, which guides the T2I model to reconstruct fine local structures according to its low-resolution input. These innovations unlock higher resolutions, allowing T2I diffusion models to be applied to image SR tasks without limitation on resolution.
Hallucination Score: Towards Mitigating Hallucinations in Generative Image Super-Resolution
Generative super-resolution (GSR) currently sets the state-of-the-art in terms of perceptual image quality, overcoming the "regression-to-the-mean" blur of prior non-generative models. However, from a human perspective, such models do not fully conform to the optimal balance between quality and fidelity. Instead, a different class of artifacts, in which generated details fail to perceptually match the low resolution image (LRI) or ground-truth image (GTI), is a critical but under studied issue in GSR, limiting its practical deployments. In this work, we focus on measuring, analyzing, and mitigating these artifacts (i.e., "hallucinations"). We observe that hallucinations are not well-characterized with existing image metrics or quality models, as they are orthogonal to both exact fidelity and no-reference quality. Instead, we take advantage of a multimodal large language model (MLLM) by constructing a prompt that assesses hallucinatory visual elements and generates a "Hallucination Score" (HS). We find that our HS is closely aligned with human evaluations, and also provides complementary insights to prior image metrics used for super-resolution (SR) models. In addition, we find certain deep feature distances have strong correlations with HS. We therefore propose to align the GSR models by using such features as differentiable reward functions to mitigate hallucinations.
Sequence Matters: Harnessing Video Models in 3D Super-Resolution
3D super-resolution aims to reconstruct high-fidelity 3D models from low-resolution (LR) multi-view images. Early studies primarily focused on single-image super-resolution (SISR) models to upsample LR images into high-resolution images. However, these methods often lack view consistency because they operate independently on each image. Although various post-processing techniques have been extensively explored to mitigate these inconsistencies, they have yet to fully resolve the issues. In this paper, we perform a comprehensive study of 3D super-resolution by leveraging video super-resolution (VSR) models. By utilizing VSR models, we ensure a higher degree of spatial consistency and can reference surrounding spatial information, leading to more accurate and detailed reconstructions. Our findings reveal that VSR models can perform remarkably well even on sequences that lack precise spatial alignment. Given this observation, we propose a simple yet practical approach to align LR images without involving fine-tuning or generating 'smooth' trajectory from the trained 3D models over LR images. The experimental results show that the surprisingly simple algorithms can achieve the state-of-the-art results of 3D super-resolution tasks on standard benchmark datasets, such as the NeRF-synthetic and MipNeRF-360 datasets. Project page: https://ko-lani.github.io/Sequence-Matters
mPLUG-DocOwl2: High-resolution Compressing for OCR-free Multi-page Document Understanding
Multimodel Large Language Models(MLLMs) have achieved promising OCR-free Document Understanding performance by increasing the supported resolution of document images. However, this comes at the cost of generating thousands of visual tokens for a single document image, leading to excessive GPU memory and slower inference times, particularly in multi-page document comprehension. In this work, to address these challenges, we propose a High-resolution DocCompressor module to compress each high-resolution document image into 324 tokens, guided by low-resolution global visual features. With this compression module, to strengthen multi-page document comprehension ability and balance both token efficiency and question-answering performance, we develop the DocOwl2 under a three-stage training framework: Single-image Pretraining, Multi-image Continue-pretraining, and Multi-task Finetuning. DocOwl2 sets a new state-of-the-art across multi-page document understanding benchmarks and reduces first token latency by more than 50%, demonstrating advanced capabilities in multi-page questioning answering, explanation with evidence pages, and cross-page structure understanding. Additionally, compared to single-image MLLMs trained on similar data, our DocOwl2 achieves comparable single-page understanding performance with less than 20% of the visual tokens. Our codes, models, and data are publicly available at https://github.com/X-PLUG/mPLUG-DocOwl/tree/main/DocOwl2.
Crafting Training Degradation Distribution for the Accuracy-Generalization Trade-off in Real-World Super-Resolution
Super-resolution (SR) techniques designed for real-world applications commonly encounter two primary challenges: generalization performance and restoration accuracy. We demonstrate that when methods are trained using complex, large-range degradations to enhance generalization, a decline in accuracy is inevitable. However, since the degradation in a certain real-world applications typically exhibits a limited variation range, it becomes feasible to strike a trade-off between generalization performance and testing accuracy within this scope. In this work, we introduce a novel approach to craft training degradation distributions using a small set of reference images. Our strategy is founded upon the binned representation of the degradation space and the Fr\'echet distance between degradation distributions. Our results indicate that the proposed technique significantly improves the performance of test images while preserving generalization capabilities in real-world applications.
AdaptVision: Dynamic Input Scaling in MLLMs for Versatile Scene Understanding
Over the past few years, the advancement of Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) has captured the wide interest of researchers, leading to numerous innovations to enhance MLLMs' comprehension. In this paper, we present AdaptVision, a multimodal large language model specifically designed to dynamically process input images at varying resolutions. We hypothesize that the requisite number of visual tokens for the model is contingent upon both the resolution and content of the input image. Generally, natural images with a lower information density can be effectively interpreted by the model using fewer visual tokens at reduced resolutions. In contrast, images containing textual content, such as documents with rich text, necessitate a higher number of visual tokens for accurate text interpretation due to their higher information density. Building on this insight, we devise a dynamic image partitioning module that adjusts the number of visual tokens according to the size and aspect ratio of images. This method mitigates distortion effects that arise from resizing images to a uniform resolution and dynamically optimizing the visual tokens input to the LLMs. Our model is capable of processing images with resolutions up to 1008times 1008. Extensive experiments across various datasets demonstrate that our method achieves impressive performance in handling vision-language tasks in both natural and text-related scenes. The source code and dataset are now publicly available at https://github.com/harrytea/AdaptVision.
How Far Are We to GPT-4V? Closing the Gap to Commercial Multimodal Models with Open-Source Suites
In this report, we introduce InternVL 1.5, an open-source multimodal large language model (MLLM) to bridge the capability gap between open-source and proprietary commercial models in multimodal understanding. We introduce three simple improvements: (1) Strong Vision Encoder: we explored a continuous learning strategy for the large-scale vision foundation model -- InternViT-6B, boosting its visual understanding capabilities, and making it can be transferred and reused in different LLMs. (2) Dynamic High-Resolution: we divide images into tiles ranging from 1 to 40 of 448times448 pixels according to the aspect ratio and resolution of the input images, which supports up to 4K resolution input. (3) High-Quality Bilingual Dataset: we carefully collected a high-quality bilingual dataset that covers common scenes, document images, and annotated them with English and Chinese question-answer pairs, significantly enhancing performance in OCR- and Chinese-related tasks. We evaluate InternVL 1.5 through a series of benchmarks and comparative studies. Compared to both open-source and proprietary models, InternVL 1.5 shows competitive performance, achieving state-of-the-art results in 8 of 18 benchmarks. Code has been released at https://github.com/OpenGVLab/InternVL.
What You See is What You GAN: Rendering Every Pixel for High-Fidelity Geometry in 3D GANs
3D-aware Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) have shown remarkable progress in learning to generate multi-view-consistent images and 3D geometries of scenes from collections of 2D images via neural volume rendering. Yet, the significant memory and computational costs of dense sampling in volume rendering have forced 3D GANs to adopt patch-based training or employ low-resolution rendering with post-processing 2D super resolution, which sacrifices multiview consistency and the quality of resolved geometry. Consequently, 3D GANs have not yet been able to fully resolve the rich 3D geometry present in 2D images. In this work, we propose techniques to scale neural volume rendering to the much higher resolution of native 2D images, thereby resolving fine-grained 3D geometry with unprecedented detail. Our approach employs learning-based samplers for accelerating neural rendering for 3D GAN training using up to 5 times fewer depth samples. This enables us to explicitly "render every pixel" of the full-resolution image during training and inference without post-processing superresolution in 2D. Together with our strategy to learn high-quality surface geometry, our method synthesizes high-resolution 3D geometry and strictly view-consistent images while maintaining image quality on par with baselines relying on post-processing super resolution. We demonstrate state-of-the-art 3D gemetric quality on FFHQ and AFHQ, setting a new standard for unsupervised learning of 3D shapes in 3D GANs.
The Tenth NTIRE 2025 Efficient Super-Resolution Challenge Report
This paper presents a comprehensive review of the NTIRE 2025 Challenge on Single-Image Efficient Super-Resolution (ESR). The challenge aimed to advance the development of deep models that optimize key computational metrics, i.e., runtime, parameters, and FLOPs, while achieving a PSNR of at least 26.90 dB on the DIV2K_LSDIR_valid dataset and 26.99 dB on the DIV2K_LSDIR_test dataset. A robust participation saw 244 registered entrants, with 43 teams submitting valid entries. This report meticulously analyzes these methods and results, emphasizing groundbreaking advancements in state-of-the-art single-image ESR techniques. The analysis highlights innovative approaches and establishes benchmarks for future research in the field.
LMR: A Large-Scale Multi-Reference Dataset for Reference-based Super-Resolution
It is widely agreed that reference-based super-resolution (RefSR) achieves superior results by referring to similar high quality images, compared to single image super-resolution (SISR). Intuitively, the more references, the better performance. However, previous RefSR methods have all focused on single-reference image training, while multiple reference images are often available in testing or practical applications. The root cause of such training-testing mismatch is the absence of publicly available multi-reference SR training datasets, which greatly hinders research efforts on multi-reference super-resolution. To this end, we construct a large-scale, multi-reference super-resolution dataset, named LMR. It contains 112,142 groups of 300x300 training images, which is 10x of the existing largest RefSR dataset. The image size is also much larger. More importantly, each group is equipped with 5 reference images with different similarity levels. Furthermore, we propose a new baseline method for multi-reference super-resolution: MRefSR, including a Multi-Reference Attention Module (MAM) for feature fusion of an arbitrary number of reference images, and a Spatial Aware Filtering Module (SAFM) for the fused feature selection. The proposed MRefSR achieves significant improvements over state-of-the-art approaches on both quantitative and qualitative evaluations. Our code and data would be made available soon.
Enhanced Semantic Extraction and Guidance for UGC Image Super Resolution
Due to the disparity between real-world degradations in user-generated content(UGC) images and synthetic degradations, traditional super-resolution methods struggle to generalize effectively, necessitating a more robust approach to model real-world distortions. In this paper, we propose a novel approach to UGC image super-resolution by integrating semantic guidance into a diffusion framework. Our method addresses the inconsistency between degradations in wild and synthetic datasets by separately simulating the degradation processes on the LSDIR dataset and combining them with the official paired training set. Furthermore, we enhance degradation removal and detail generation by incorporating a pretrained semantic extraction model (SAM2) and fine-tuning key hyperparameters for improved perceptual fidelity. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superiority of our approach against state-of-the-art methods. Additionally, the proposed model won second place in the CVPR NTIRE 2025 Short-form UGC Image Super-Resolution Challenge, further validating its effectiveness. The code is available at https://github.c10pom/Moonsofang/NTIRE-2025-SRlab.
CasSR: Activating Image Power for Real-World Image Super-Resolution
The objective of image super-resolution is to generate clean and high-resolution images from degraded versions. Recent advancements in diffusion modeling have led to the emergence of various image super-resolution techniques that leverage pretrained text-to-image (T2I) models. Nevertheless, due to the prevalent severe degradation in low-resolution images and the inherent characteristics of diffusion models, achieving high-fidelity image restoration remains challenging. Existing methods often exhibit issues including semantic loss, artifacts, and the introduction of spurious content not present in the original image. To tackle this challenge, we propose Cascaded diffusion for Super-Resolution, CasSR , a novel method designed to produce highly detailed and realistic images. In particular, we develop a cascaded controllable diffusion model that aims to optimize the extraction of information from low-resolution images. This model generates a preliminary reference image to facilitate initial information extraction and degradation mitigation. Furthermore, we propose a multi-attention mechanism to enhance the T2I model's capability in maximizing the restoration of the original image content. Through a comprehensive blend of qualitative and quantitative analyses, we substantiate the efficacy and superiority of our approach.
Exploiting Diffusion Prior for Real-World Image Super-Resolution
We present a novel approach to leverage prior knowledge encapsulated in pre-trained text-to-image diffusion models for blind super-resolution (SR). Specifically, by employing our time-aware encoder, we can achieve promising restoration results without altering the pre-trained synthesis model, thereby preserving the generative prior and minimizing training cost. To remedy the loss of fidelity caused by the inherent stochasticity of diffusion models, we introduce a controllable feature wrapping module that allows users to balance quality and fidelity by simply adjusting a scalar value during the inference process. Moreover, we develop a progressive aggregation sampling strategy to overcome the fixed-size constraints of pre-trained diffusion models, enabling adaptation to resolutions of any size. A comprehensive evaluation of our method using both synthetic and real-world benchmarks demonstrates its superiority over current state-of-the-art approaches.
TextSR: Diffusion Super-Resolution with Multilingual OCR Guidance
While recent advancements in Image Super-Resolution (SR) using diffusion models have shown promise in improving overall image quality, their application to scene text images has revealed limitations. These models often struggle with accurate text region localization and fail to effectively model image and multilingual character-to-shape priors. This leads to inconsistencies, the generation of hallucinated textures, and a decrease in the perceived quality of the super-resolved text. To address these issues, we introduce TextSR, a multimodal diffusion model specifically designed for Multilingual Scene Text Image Super-Resolution. TextSR leverages a text detector to pinpoint text regions within an image and then employs Optical Character Recognition (OCR) to extract multilingual text from these areas. The extracted text characters are then transformed into visual shapes using a UTF-8 based text encoder and cross-attention. Recognizing that OCR may sometimes produce inaccurate results in real-world scenarios, we have developed two innovative methods to enhance the robustness of our model. By integrating text character priors with the low-resolution text images, our model effectively guides the super-resolution process, enhancing fine details within the text and improving overall legibility. The superior performance of our model on both the TextZoom and TextVQA datasets sets a new benchmark for STISR, underscoring the efficacy of our approach.
GPT4Image: Can Large Pre-trained Models Help Vision Models on Perception Tasks?
The recent upsurge in pre-trained large models (e.g. GPT-4) has swept across the entire deep learning community. Such powerful large language models (LLMs) demonstrate advanced generative ability and multimodal understanding capability, which quickly achieve new state-of-the-art performances on a variety of benchmarks. The pre-trained LLM usually plays the role as a universal AI model that can conduct various tasks, including context reasoning, article analysis and image content comprehension. However, considering the prohibitively high memory and computational cost for implementing such a large model, the conventional models (such as CNN and ViT), are still essential for many visual perception tasks. In this paper, we propose to enhance the representation ability of ordinary vision models for perception tasks (e.g. image classification) by taking advantage of large pre-trained models. We present a new learning paradigm in which the knowledge extracted from large pre-trained models are utilized to help models like CNN and ViT learn enhanced representations and achieve better performance. Firstly, we curate a high quality description set by prompting a multimodal LLM to generate descriptive text for all training images. Furthermore, we feed these detailed descriptions into a pre-trained encoder to extract text embeddings with rich semantic information that encodes the content of images. During training, text embeddings will serve as extra supervising signals and be aligned with image representations learned by vision models. The alignment process helps vision models learn better and achieve higher accuracy with the assistance of pre-trained LLMs. We conduct extensive experiments to verify that the proposed algorithm consistently improves the performance for various vision models with heterogeneous architectures.
LEOPARD : A Vision Language Model For Text-Rich Multi-Image Tasks
Text-rich images, where text serves as the central visual element guiding the overall understanding, are prevalent in real-world applications, such as presentation slides, scanned documents, and webpage snapshots. Tasks involving multiple text-rich images are especially challenging, as they require not only understanding the content of individual images but reasoning about inter-relationships and logical flows across multiple visual inputs. Despite the importance of these scenarios, current multimodal large language models (MLLMs) struggle to handle such tasks due to two key challenges: (1) the scarcity of high-quality instruction tuning datasets for text-rich multi-image scenarios, and (2) the difficulty in balancing image resolution with visual feature sequence length. To address these challenges, we propose \OurMethod, a MLLM designed specifically for handling vision-language tasks involving multiple text-rich images. First, we curated about one million high-quality multimodal instruction-tuning data, tailored to text-rich, multi-image scenarios. Second, we developed an adaptive high-resolution multi-image encoding module to dynamically optimize the allocation of visual sequence length based on the original aspect ratios and resolutions of the input images. Experiments across a wide range of benchmarks demonstrate our model's superior capabilities in text-rich, multi-image evaluations and competitive performance in general domain evaluations.
Image Super-Resolution using Explicit Perceptual Loss
This paper proposes an explicit way to optimize the super-resolution network for generating visually pleasing images. The previous approaches use several loss functions which is hard to interpret and has the implicit relationships to improve the perceptual score. We show how to exploit the machine learning based model which is directly trained to provide the perceptual score on generated images. It is believed that these models can be used to optimizes the super-resolution network which is easier to interpret. We further analyze the characteristic of the existing loss and our proposed explicit perceptual loss for better interpretation. The experimental results show the explicit approach has a higher perceptual score than other approaches. Finally, we demonstrate the relation of explicit perceptual loss and visually pleasing images using subjective evaluation.
Boosting Diffusion-Based Text Image Super-Resolution Model Towards Generalized Real-World Scenarios
Restoring low-resolution text images presents a significant challenge, as it requires maintaining both the fidelity and stylistic realism of the text in restored images. Existing text image restoration methods often fall short in hard situations, as the traditional super-resolution models cannot guarantee clarity, while diffusion-based methods fail to maintain fidelity. In this paper, we introduce a novel framework aimed at improving the generalization ability of diffusion models for text image super-resolution (SR), especially promoting fidelity. First, we propose a progressive data sampling strategy that incorporates diverse image types at different stages of training, stabilizing the convergence and improving the generalization. For the network architecture, we leverage a pre-trained SR prior to provide robust spatial reasoning capabilities, enhancing the model's ability to preserve textual information. Additionally, we employ a cross-attention mechanism to better integrate textual priors. To further reduce errors in textual priors, we utilize confidence scores to dynamically adjust the importance of textual features during training. Extensive experiments on real-world datasets demonstrate that our approach not only produces text images with more realistic visual appearances but also improves the accuracy of text structure.
Fast and accurate object detection in high resolution 4K and 8K video using GPUs
Machine learning has celebrated a lot of achievements on computer vision tasks such as object detection, but the traditionally used models work with relatively low resolution images. The resolution of recording devices is gradually increasing and there is a rising need for new methods of processing high resolution data. We propose an attention pipeline method which uses two staged evaluation of each image or video frame under rough and refined resolution to limit the total number of necessary evaluations. For both stages, we make use of the fast object detection model YOLO v2. We have implemented our model in code, which distributes the work across GPUs. We maintain high accuracy while reaching the average performance of 3-6 fps on 4K video and 2 fps on 8K video.
Feast Your Eyes: Mixture-of-Resolution Adaptation for Multimodal Large Language Models
Despite remarkable progress, existing multimodal large language models (MLLMs) are still inferior in granular visual recognition. Contrary to previous works, we study this problem from the perspective of image resolution, and reveal that a combination of low- and high-resolution visual features can effectively mitigate this shortcoming. Based on this observation, we propose a novel and efficient method for MLLMs, termed Mixture-of-Resolution Adaptation (MRA). In particular, MRA adopts two visual pathways for images with different resolutions, where high-resolution visual information is embedded into the low-resolution pathway via the novel mixture-of-resolution adapters (MR-Adapters). This design also greatly reduces the input sequence length of MLLMs. To validate MRA, we apply it to a recent MLLM called LLaVA, and term the new model LLaVA-HR. We conduct extensive experiments on 11 vision-language (VL) tasks, which show that LLaVA-HR outperforms existing MLLMs on 8 VL tasks, e.g., +9.4% on TextVQA. More importantly, both training and inference of LLaVA-HR remain efficient with MRA, e.g., 20 training hours and 3times inference speed than LLaVA-1.5. Source codes are released at: https://github.com/luogen1996/LLaVA-HR.
Ferret-v2: An Improved Baseline for Referring and Grounding with Large Language Models
While Ferret seamlessly integrates regional understanding into the Large Language Model (LLM) to facilitate its referring and grounding capability, it poses certain limitations: constrained by the pre-trained fixed visual encoder and failed to perform well on broader tasks. In this work, we unveil Ferret-v2, a significant upgrade to Ferret, with three key designs. (1) Any resolution grounding and referring: A flexible approach that effortlessly handles higher image resolution, improving the model's ability to process and understand images in greater detail. (2) Multi-granularity visual encoding: By integrating the additional DINOv2 encoder, the model learns better and diverse underlying contexts for global and fine-grained visual information. (3) A three-stage training paradigm: Besides image-caption alignment, an additional stage is proposed for high-resolution dense alignment before the final instruction tuning. Experiments show that Ferret-v2 provides substantial improvements over Ferret and other state-of-the-art methods, thanks to its high-resolution scaling and fine-grained visual processing.
DocLens : A Tool-Augmented Multi-Agent Framework for Long Visual Document Understanding
Comprehending long visual documents, where information is distributed across extensive pages of text and visual elements, is a critical but challenging task for modern Vision-Language Models (VLMs). Existing approaches falter on a fundamental challenge: evidence localization. They struggle to retrieve relevant pages and overlook fine-grained details within visual elements, leading to limited performance and model hallucination. To address this, we propose DocLens, a tool-augmented multi-agent framework that effectively ``zooms in'' on evidence like a lens. It first navigates from the full document to specific visual elements on relevant pages, then employs a sampling-adjudication mechanism to generate a single, reliable answer. Paired with Gemini-2.5-Pro, DocLens achieves state-of-the-art performance on MMLongBench-Doc and FinRAGBench-V, surpassing even human experts. The framework's superiority is particularly evident on vision-centric and unanswerable queries, demonstrating the power of its enhanced localization capabilities.
Transcending the Limit of Local Window: Advanced Super-Resolution Transformer with Adaptive Token Dictionary
Single Image Super-Resolution is a classic computer vision problem that involves estimating high-resolution (HR) images from low-resolution (LR) ones. Although deep neural networks (DNNs), especially Transformers for super-resolution, have seen significant advancements in recent years, challenges still remain, particularly in limited receptive field caused by window-based self-attention. To address these issues, we introduce a group of auxiliary Adaptive Token Dictionary to SR Transformer and establish an ATD-SR method. The introduced token dictionary could learn prior information from training data and adapt the learned prior to specific testing image through an adaptive refinement step. The refinement strategy could not only provide global information to all input tokens but also group image tokens into categories. Based on category partitions, we further propose a category-based self-attention mechanism designed to leverage distant but similar tokens for enhancing input features. The experimental results show that our method achieves the best performance on various single image super-resolution benchmarks.
Collapsible Linear Blocks for Super-Efficient Super Resolution
With the advent of smart devices that support 4K and 8K resolution, Single Image Super Resolution (SISR) has become an important computer vision problem. However, most super resolution deep networks are computationally very expensive. In this paper, we propose Super-Efficient Super Resolution (SESR) networks that establish a new state-of-the-art for efficient super resolution. Our approach is based on linear overparameterization of CNNs and creates an efficient model architecture for SISR. With theoretical analysis, we uncover the limitations of existing overparameterization methods and show how the proposed method alleviates them. Detailed experiments across six benchmark datasets demonstrate that SESR achieves similar or better image quality than state-of-the-art models while requiring 2x to 330x fewer Multiply-Accumulate (MAC) operations. As a result, SESR can be used on constrained hardware to perform x2 (1080p to 4K) and x4 (1080p to 8K) SISR. Towards this, we estimate hardware performance numbers for a commercial Arm mobile-Neural Processing Unit (NPU) for 1080p to 4K (x2) and 1080p to 8K (x4) SISR. Our results highlight the challenges faced by super resolution on AI accelerators and demonstrate that SESR is significantly faster (e.g., 6x-8x higher FPS) than existing models on mobile-NPU. Finally, SESR outperforms prior models by 1.5x-2x in latency on Arm CPU and GPU when deployed on a real mobile device. The code for this work is available at https://github.com/ARM-software/sesr.
OtterHD: A High-Resolution Multi-modality Model
In this paper, we present OtterHD-8B, an innovative multimodal model evolved from Fuyu-8B, specifically engineered to interpret high-resolution visual inputs with granular precision. Unlike conventional models that are constrained by fixed-size vision encoders, OtterHD-8B boasts the ability to handle flexible input dimensions, ensuring its versatility across various inference requirements. Alongside this model, we introduce MagnifierBench, an evaluation framework designed to scrutinize models' ability to discern minute details and spatial relationships of small objects. Our comparative analysis reveals that while current leading models falter on this benchmark, OtterHD-8B, particularly when directly processing high-resolution inputs, outperforms its counterparts by a substantial margin. The findings illuminate the structural variances in visual information processing among different models and the influence that the vision encoders' pre-training resolution disparities have on model effectiveness within such benchmarks. Our study highlights the critical role of flexibility and high-resolution input capabilities in large multimodal models and also exemplifies the potential inherent in the Fuyu architecture's simplicity for handling complex visual data.
FreeSwim: Revisiting Sliding-Window Attention Mechanisms for Training-Free Ultra-High-Resolution Video Generation
The quadratic time and memory complexity of the attention mechanism in modern Transformer based video generators makes end-to-end training for ultra high resolution videos prohibitively expensive. Motivated by this limitation, we introduce a training-free approach that leverages video Diffusion Transformers pretrained at their native scale to synthesize higher resolution videos without any additional training or adaptation. At the core of our method lies an inward sliding window attention mechanism, which originates from a key observation: maintaining each query token's training scale receptive field is crucial for preserving visual fidelity and detail. However, naive local window attention, unfortunately, often leads to repetitive content and exhibits a lack of global coherence in the generated results. To overcome this challenge, we devise a dual-path pipeline that backs up window attention with a novel cross-attention override strategy, enabling the semantic content produced by local attention to be guided by another branch with a full receptive field and, therefore, ensuring holistic consistency. Furthermore, to improve efficiency, we incorporate a cross-attention caching strategy for this branch to avoid the frequent computation of full 3D attention. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method delivers ultra-high-resolution videos with fine-grained visual details and high efficiency in a training-free paradigm. Meanwhile, it achieves superior performance on VBench, even compared to training-based alternatives, with competitive or improved efficiency. Codes are available at: https://github.com/WillWu111/FreeSwim
SuperGen: An Efficient Ultra-high-resolution Video Generation System with Sketching and Tiling
Diffusion models have recently achieved remarkable success in generative tasks (e.g., image and video generation), and the demand for high-quality content (e.g., 2K/4K videos) is rapidly increasing across various domains. However, generating ultra-high-resolution videos on existing standard-resolution (e.g., 720p) platforms remains challenging due to the excessive re-training requirements and prohibitively high computational and memory costs. To this end, we introduce SuperGen, an efficient tile-based framework for ultra-high-resolution video generation. SuperGen features a novel training-free algorithmic innovation with tiling to successfully support a wide range of resolutions without additional training efforts while significantly reducing both memory footprint and computational complexity. Moreover, SuperGen incorporates a tile-tailored, adaptive, region-aware caching strategy that accelerates video generation by exploiting redundancy across denoising steps and spatial regions. SuperGen also integrates cache-guided, communication-minimized tile parallelism for enhanced throughput and minimized latency. Evaluations demonstrate that SuperGen harvests the maximum performance gains while achieving high output quality across various benchmarks.
UniViTAR: Unified Vision Transformer with Native Resolution
Conventional Vision Transformer simplifies visual modeling by standardizing input resolutions, often disregarding the variability of natural visual data and compromising spatial-contextual fidelity. While preliminary explorations have superficially investigated native resolution modeling, existing approaches still lack systematic analysis from a visual representation perspective. To bridge this gap, we introduce UniViTAR, a family of homogeneous vision foundation models tailored for unified visual modality and native resolution scenario in the era of multimodal. Our framework first conducts architectural upgrades to the vanilla paradigm by integrating multiple advanced components. Building upon these improvements, a progressive training paradigm is introduced, which strategically combines two core mechanisms: (1) resolution curriculum learning, transitioning from fixed-resolution pretraining to native resolution tuning, thereby leveraging ViT's inherent adaptability to variable-length sequences, and (2) visual modality adaptation via inter-batch image-video switching, which balances computational efficiency with enhanced temporal reasoning. In parallel, a hybrid training framework further synergizes sigmoid-based contrastive loss with feature distillation from a frozen teacher model, thereby accelerating early-stage convergence. Finally, trained exclusively on public datasets, externsive experiments across multiple model scales from 0.3B to 1B demonstrate its effectiveness.
Downscaled Representation Matters: Improving Image Rescaling with Collaborative Downscaled Images
Deep networks have achieved great success in image rescaling (IR) task that seeks to learn the optimal downscaled representations, i.e., low-resolution (LR) images, to reconstruct the original high-resolution (HR) images. Compared with super-resolution methods that consider a fixed downscaling scheme, e.g., bicubic, IR often achieves significantly better reconstruction performance thanks to the learned downscaled representations. This highlights the importance of a good downscaled representation in image reconstruction tasks. Existing IR methods mainly learn the downscaled representation by jointly optimizing the downscaling and upscaling models. Unlike them, we seek to improve the downscaled representation through a different and more direct way: optimizing the downscaled image itself instead of the down-/upscaling models. Specifically, we propose a collaborative downscaling scheme that directly generates the collaborative LR examples by descending the gradient w.r.t. the reconstruction loss on them to benefit the IR process. Furthermore, since LR images are downscaled from the corresponding HR images, one can also improve the downscaled representation if we have a better representation in the HR domain. Inspired by this, we propose a Hierarchical Collaborative Downscaling (HCD) method that performs gradient descent in both HR and LR domains to improve the downscaled representations. Extensive experiments show that our HCD significantly improves the reconstruction performance both quantitatively and qualitatively. Moreover, we also highlight the flexibility of our HCD since it can generalize well across diverse IR models.
Accelerating Image Super-Resolution Networks with Pixel-Level Classification
In recent times, the need for effective super-resolution (SR) techniques has surged, especially for large-scale images ranging 2K to 8K resolutions. For DNN-based SISR, decomposing images into overlapping patches is typically necessary due to computational constraints. In such patch-decomposing scheme, one can allocate computational resources differently based on each patch's difficulty to further improve efficiency while maintaining SR performance. However, this approach has a limitation: computational resources is uniformly allocated within a patch, leading to lower efficiency when the patch contain pixels with varying levels of restoration difficulty. To address the issue, we propose the Pixel-level Classifier for Single Image Super-Resolution (PCSR), a novel method designed to distribute computational resources adaptively at the pixel level. A PCSR model comprises a backbone, a pixel-level classifier, and a set of pixel-level upsamplers with varying capacities. The pixel-level classifier assigns each pixel to an appropriate upsampler based on its restoration difficulty, thereby optimizing computational resource usage. Our method allows for performance and computational cost balance during inference without re-training. Our experiments demonstrate PCSR's advantage over existing patch-distributing methods in PSNR-FLOP trade-offs across different backbone models and benchmarks. The code is available at https://github.com/3587jjh/PCSR.
SEAL: A Framework for Systematic Evaluation of Real-World Super-Resolution
Real-world Super-Resolution (Real-SR) methods focus on dealing with diverse real-world images and have attracted increasing attention in recent years. The key idea is to use a complex and high-order degradation model to mimic real-world degradations. Although they have achieved impressive results in various scenarios, they are faced with the obstacle of evaluation. Currently, these methods are only assessed by their average performance on a small set of degradation cases randomly selected from a large space, which fails to provide a comprehensive understanding of their overall performance and often yields inconsistent and potentially misleading results. To overcome the limitation in evaluation, we propose SEAL, a framework for systematic evaluation of real-SR. In particular, we cluster the extensive degradation space to create a set of representative degradation cases, which serves as a comprehensive test set. Next, we propose a coarse-to-fine evaluation protocol to measure the distributed and relative performance of real-SR methods on the test set. The protocol incorporates two new metrics: acceptance rate (AR) and relative performance ratio (RPR), derived from acceptance and excellence lines. Under SEAL, we benchmark existing real-SR methods, obtain new observations and insights into their performance, and develop a new strong baseline. We consider SEAL as the first step towards creating a comprehensive real-SR evaluation platform, which can promote the development of real-SR. The source code is available at https://github.com/XPixelGroup/SEAL
HiRes-LLaVA: Restoring Fragmentation Input in High-Resolution Large Vision-Language Models
High-resolution inputs enable Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) to discern finer visual details, enhancing their comprehension capabilities. To reduce the training and computation costs caused by high-resolution input, one promising direction is to use sliding windows to slice the input into uniform patches, each matching the input size of the well-trained vision encoder. Although efficient, this slicing strategy leads to the fragmentation of original input, i.e., the continuity of contextual information and spatial geometry is lost across patches, adversely affecting performance in cross-patch context perception and position-specific tasks. To overcome these shortcomings, we introduce HiRes-LLaVA, a novel framework designed to efficiently process any size of high-resolution input without altering the original contextual and geometric information. HiRes-LLaVA comprises two innovative components: (i) a SliceRestore adapter that reconstructs sliced patches into their original form, efficiently extracting both global and local features via down-up-sampling and convolution layers, and (ii) a Self-Mining Sampler to compresses the vision tokens based on themselves, preserving the original context and positional information while reducing training overhead. To assess the ability of handling context fragmentation, we construct a new benchmark, EntityGrid-QA, consisting of edge-related and position-related tasks. Our comprehensive experiments demonstrate the superiority of HiRes-LLaVA on both existing public benchmarks and on EntityGrid-QA, particularly on document-oriented tasks, establishing new standards for handling high-resolution inputs.
ImageRAG: Enhancing Ultra High Resolution Remote Sensing Imagery Analysis with ImageRAG
Ultra High Resolution (UHR) remote sensing imagery (RSI) (e.g. 100,000 times 100,000 pixels or more) poses a significant challenge for current Remote Sensing Multimodal Large Language Models (RSMLLMs). If choose to resize the UHR image to standard input image size, the extensive spatial and contextual information that UHR images contain will be neglected. Otherwise, the original size of these images often exceeds the token limits of standard RSMLLMs, making it difficult to process the entire image and capture long-range dependencies to answer the query based on the abundant visual context. In this paper, we introduce ImageRAG for RS, a training-free framework to address the complexities of analyzing UHR remote sensing imagery. By transforming UHR remote sensing image analysis task to image's long context selection task, we design an innovative image contextual retrieval mechanism based on the Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) technique, denoted as ImageRAG. ImageRAG's core innovation lies in its ability to selectively retrieve and focus on the most relevant portions of the UHR image as visual contexts that pertain to a given query. Fast path and slow path are proposed in this framework to handle this task efficiently and effectively. ImageRAG allows RSMLLMs to manage extensive context and spatial information from UHR RSI, ensuring the analysis is both accurate and efficient. Codebase will be released in https://github.com/om-ai-lab/ImageRAG
Ultra-High-Resolution Image Synthesis: Data, Method and Evaluation
Ultra-high-resolution image synthesis holds significant potential, yet remains an underexplored challenge due to the absence of standardized benchmarks and computational constraints. In this paper, we establish Aesthetic-4K, a meticulously curated dataset containing dedicated training and evaluation subsets specifically designed for comprehensive research on ultra-high-resolution image synthesis. This dataset consists of high-quality 4K images accompanied by descriptive captions generated by GPT-4o. Furthermore, we propose Diffusion-4K, an innovative framework for the direct generation of ultra-high-resolution images. Our approach incorporates the Scale Consistent Variational Auto-Encoder (SC-VAE) and Wavelet-based Latent Fine-tuning (WLF), which are designed for efficient visual token compression and the capture of intricate details in ultra-high-resolution images, thereby facilitating direct training with photorealistic 4K data. This method is applicable to various latent diffusion models and demonstrates its efficacy in synthesizing highly detailed 4K images. Additionally, we propose novel metrics, namely the GLCM Score and Compression Ratio, to assess the texture richness and fine details in local patches, in conjunction with holistic measures such as FID, Aesthetics, and CLIPScore, enabling a thorough and multifaceted evaluation of ultra-high-resolution image synthesis. Consequently, Diffusion-4K achieves impressive performance in ultra-high-resolution image synthesis, particularly when powered by state-of-the-art large-scale diffusion models (eg, Flux-12B). The source code is publicly available at https://github.com/zhang0jhon/diffusion-4k.
FeatSharp: Your Vision Model Features, Sharper
The feature maps of vision encoders are fundamental to myriad modern AI tasks, ranging from core perception algorithms (e.g. semantic segmentation, object detection, depth perception, etc.) to modern multimodal understanding in vision-language models (VLMs). Currently, in computer vision, the frontier of general purpose vision backbones is Vision Transformers (ViT), typically trained using contrastive loss (e.g. CLIP). A key problem with most off-the-shelf ViTs, particularly CLIP, is that these models are inflexibly low resolution. Most run at 224 times 224px, while the "high-resolution" versions are around 378-448px, but still inflexible. We introduce a novel method to coherently and cheaply upsample the feature maps of low-resolution vision encoders while picking up on fine-grained details that would otherwise be lost due to resolution. We demonstrate the effectiveness of this approach on core perception tasks as well as within agglomerative model training using RADIO as a way of providing richer targets for distillation. Code available at https://github.com/NVlabs/FeatSharp .
FreqINR: Frequency Consistency for Implicit Neural Representation with Adaptive DCT Frequency Loss
Recent advancements in local Implicit Neural Representation (INR) demonstrate its exceptional capability in handling images at various resolutions. However, frequency discrepancies between high-resolution (HR) and ground-truth images, especially at larger scales, result in significant artifacts and blurring in HR images. This paper introduces Frequency Consistency for Implicit Neural Representation (FreqINR), an innovative Arbitrary-scale Super-resolution method aimed at enhancing detailed textures by ensuring spectral consistency throughout both training and inference. During training, we employ Adaptive Discrete Cosine Transform Frequency Loss (ADFL) to minimize the frequency gap between HR and ground-truth images, utilizing 2-Dimensional DCT bases and focusing dynamically on challenging frequencies. During inference, we extend the receptive field to preserve spectral coherence between low-resolution (LR) and ground-truth images, which is crucial for the model to generate high-frequency details from LR counterparts. Experimental results show that FreqINR, as a lightweight approach, achieves state-of-the-art performance compared to existing Arbitrary-scale Super-resolution methods and offers notable improvements in computational efficiency. The code for our method will be made publicly available.
Frame-Recurrent Video Super-Resolution
Recent advances in video super-resolution have shown that convolutional neural networks combined with motion compensation are able to merge information from multiple low-resolution (LR) frames to generate high-quality images. Current state-of-the-art methods process a batch of LR frames to generate a single high-resolution (HR) frame and run this scheme in a sliding window fashion over the entire video, effectively treating the problem as a large number of separate multi-frame super-resolution tasks. This approach has two main weaknesses: 1) Each input frame is processed and warped multiple times, increasing the computational cost, and 2) each output frame is estimated independently conditioned on the input frames, limiting the system's ability to produce temporally consistent results. In this work, we propose an end-to-end trainable frame-recurrent video super-resolution framework that uses the previously inferred HR estimate to super-resolve the subsequent frame. This naturally encourages temporally consistent results and reduces the computational cost by warping only one image in each step. Furthermore, due to its recurrent nature, the proposed method has the ability to assimilate a large number of previous frames without increased computational demands. Extensive evaluations and comparisons with previous methods validate the strengths of our approach and demonstrate that the proposed framework is able to significantly outperform the current state of the art.
Benchmarking Ultra-High-Definition Image Reflection Removal
Deep learning based methods have achieved significant success in the task of single image reflection removal (SIRR). However, the majority of these methods are focused on High-Definition/Standard-Definition (HD/SD) images, while ignoring higher resolution images such as Ultra-High-Definition (UHD) images. With the increasing prevalence of UHD images captured by modern devices, in this paper, we aim to address the problem of UHD SIRR. Specifically, we first synthesize two large-scale UHD datasets, UHDRR4K and UHDRR8K. The UHDRR4K dataset consists of 2,999 and 168 quadruplets of images for training and testing respectively, and the UHDRR8K dataset contains 1,014 and 105 quadruplets. To the best of our knowledge, these two datasets are the first largest-scale UHD datasets for SIRR. Then, we conduct a comprehensive evaluation of six state-of-the-art SIRR methods using the proposed datasets. Based on the results, we provide detailed discussions regarding the strengths and limitations of these methods when applied to UHD images. Finally, we present a transformer-based architecture named RRFormer for reflection removal. RRFormer comprises three modules, namely the Prepossessing Embedding Module, Self-attention Feature Extraction Module, and Multi-scale Spatial Feature Extraction Module. These modules extract hypercolumn features, global and partial attention features, and multi-scale spatial features, respectively. To ensure effective training, we utilize three terms in our loss function: pixel loss, feature loss, and adversarial loss. We demonstrate through experimental results that RRFormer achieves state-of-the-art performance on both the non-UHD dataset and our proposed UHDRR datasets. The code and datasets are publicly available at https://github.com/Liar-zzy/Benchmarking-Ultra-High-Definition-Single-Image-Reflection-Removal.
Lightweight Image Super-Resolution with Information Multi-distillation Network
In recent years, single image super-resolution (SISR) methods using deep convolution neural network (CNN) have achieved impressive results. Thanks to the powerful representation capabilities of the deep networks, numerous previous ways can learn the complex non-linear mapping between low-resolution (LR) image patches and their high-resolution (HR) versions. However, excessive convolutions will limit the application of super-resolution technology in low computing power devices. Besides, super-resolution of any arbitrary scale factor is a critical issue in practical applications, which has not been well solved in the previous approaches. To address these issues, we propose a lightweight information multi-distillation network (IMDN) by constructing the cascaded information multi-distillation blocks (IMDB), which contains distillation and selective fusion parts. Specifically, the distillation module extracts hierarchical features step-by-step, and fusion module aggregates them according to the importance of candidate features, which is evaluated by the proposed contrast-aware channel attention mechanism. To process real images with any sizes, we develop an adaptive cropping strategy (ACS) to super-resolve block-wise image patches using the same well-trained model. Extensive experiments suggest that the proposed method performs favorably against the state-of-the-art SR algorithms in term of visual quality, memory footprint, and inference time. Code is available at https://github.com/Zheng222/IMDN.
HSR-Diff:Hyperspectral Image Super-Resolution via Conditional Diffusion Models
Despite the proven significance of hyperspectral images (HSIs) in performing various computer vision tasks, its potential is adversely affected by the low-resolution (LR) property in the spatial domain, resulting from multiple physical factors. Inspired by recent advancements in deep generative models, we propose an HSI Super-resolution (SR) approach with Conditional Diffusion Models (HSR-Diff) that merges a high-resolution (HR) multispectral image (MSI) with the corresponding LR-HSI. HSR-Diff generates an HR-HSI via repeated refinement, in which the HR-HSI is initialized with pure Gaussian noise and iteratively refined. At each iteration, the noise is removed with a Conditional Denoising Transformer (CDF ormer) that is trained on denoising at different noise levels, conditioned on the hierarchical feature maps of HR-MSI and LR-HSI. In addition, a progressive learning strategy is employed to exploit the global information of full-resolution images. Systematic experiments have been conducted on four public datasets, demonstrating that HSR-Diff outperforms state-of-the-art methods.
Real-Time Quantized Image Super-Resolution on Mobile NPUs, Mobile AI 2021 Challenge: Report
Image super-resolution is one of the most popular computer vision problems with many important applications to mobile devices. While many solutions have been proposed for this task, they are usually not optimized even for common smartphone AI hardware, not to mention more constrained smart TV platforms that are often supporting INT8 inference only. To address this problem, we introduce the first Mobile AI challenge, where the target is to develop an end-to-end deep learning-based image super-resolution solutions that can demonstrate a real-time performance on mobile or edge NPUs. For this, the participants were provided with the DIV2K dataset and trained quantized models to do an efficient 3X image upscaling. The runtime of all models was evaluated on the Synaptics VS680 Smart Home board with a dedicated NPU capable of accelerating quantized neural networks. The proposed solutions are fully compatible with all major mobile AI accelerators and are capable of reconstructing Full HD images under 40-60 ms while achieving high fidelity results. A detailed description of all models developed in the challenge is provided in this paper.
Deep Laplacian Pyramid Networks for Fast and Accurate Super-Resolution
Convolutional neural networks have recently demonstrated high-quality reconstruction for single-image super-resolution. In this paper, we propose the Laplacian Pyramid Super-Resolution Network (LapSRN) to progressively reconstruct the sub-band residuals of high-resolution images. At each pyramid level, our model takes coarse-resolution feature maps as input, predicts the high-frequency residuals, and uses transposed convolutions for upsampling to the finer level. Our method does not require the bicubic interpolation as the pre-processing step and thus dramatically reduces the computational complexity. We train the proposed LapSRN with deep supervision using a robust Charbonnier loss function and achieve high-quality reconstruction. Furthermore, our network generates multi-scale predictions in one feed-forward pass through the progressive reconstruction, thereby facilitates resource-aware applications. Extensive quantitative and qualitative evaluations on benchmark datasets show that the proposed algorithm performs favorably against the state-of-the-art methods in terms of speed and accuracy.
SeeSR: Towards Semantics-Aware Real-World Image Super-Resolution
Owe to the powerful generative priors, the pre-trained text-to-image (T2I) diffusion models have become increasingly popular in solving the real-world image super-resolution problem. However, as a consequence of the heavy quality degradation of input low-resolution (LR) images, the destruction of local structures can lead to ambiguous image semantics. As a result, the content of reproduced high-resolution image may have semantic errors, deteriorating the super-resolution performance. To address this issue, we present a semantics-aware approach to better preserve the semantic fidelity of generative real-world image super-resolution. First, we train a degradation-aware prompt extractor, which can generate accurate soft and hard semantic prompts even under strong degradation. The hard semantic prompts refer to the image tags, aiming to enhance the local perception ability of the T2I model, while the soft semantic prompts compensate for the hard ones to provide additional representation information. These semantic prompts encourage the T2I model to generate detailed and semantically accurate results. Furthermore, during the inference process, we integrate the LR images into the initial sampling noise to mitigate the diffusion model's tendency to generate excessive random details. The experiments show that our method can reproduce more realistic image details and hold better the semantics. The source code of our method can be found at https://github.com/cswry/SeeSR.
Effective Invertible Arbitrary Image Rescaling
Great successes have been achieved using deep learning techniques for image super-resolution (SR) with fixed scales. To increase its real world applicability, numerous models have also been proposed to restore SR images with arbitrary scale factors, including asymmetric ones where images are resized to different scales along horizontal and vertical directions. Though most models are only optimized for the unidirectional upscaling task while assuming a predefined downscaling kernel for low-resolution (LR) inputs, recent models based on Invertible Neural Networks (INN) are able to increase upscaling accuracy significantly by optimizing the downscaling and upscaling cycle jointly. However, limited by the INN architecture, it is constrained to fixed integer scale factors and requires one model for each scale. Without increasing model complexity, a simple and effective invertible arbitrary rescaling network (IARN) is proposed to achieve arbitrary image rescaling by training only one model in this work. Using innovative components like position-aware scale encoding and preemptive channel splitting, the network is optimized to convert the non-invertible rescaling cycle to an effectively invertible process. It is shown to achieve a state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance in bidirectional arbitrary rescaling without compromising perceptual quality in LR outputs. It is also demonstrated to perform well on tests with asymmetric scales using the same network architecture.
Exploring Semantic Feature Discrimination for Perceptual Image Super-Resolution and Opinion-Unaware No-Reference Image Quality Assessment
Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) have been widely applied to image super-resolution (SR) to enhance the perceptual quality. However, most existing GAN-based SR methods typically perform coarse-grained discrimination directly on images and ignore the semantic information of images, making it challenging for the super resolution networks (SRN) to learn fine-grained and semantic-related texture details. To alleviate this issue, we propose a semantic feature discrimination method, SFD, for perceptual SR. Specifically, we first design a feature discriminator (Feat-D), to discriminate the pixel-wise middle semantic features from CLIP, aligning the feature distributions of SR images with that of high-quality images. Additionally, we propose a text-guided discrimination method (TG-D) by introducing learnable prompt pairs (LPP) in an adversarial manner to perform discrimination on the more abstract output feature of CLIP, further enhancing the discriminative ability of our method. With both Feat-D and TG-D, our SFD can effectively distinguish between the semantic feature distributions of low-quality and high-quality images, encouraging SRN to generate more realistic and semantic-relevant textures. Furthermore, based on the trained Feat-D and LPP, we propose a novel opinion-unaware no-reference image quality assessment (OU NR-IQA) method, SFD-IQA, greatly improving OU NR-IQA performance without any additional targeted training. Extensive experiments on classical SISR, real-world SISR, and OU NR-IQA tasks demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed methods.
UReader: Universal OCR-free Visually-situated Language Understanding with Multimodal Large Language Model
Text is ubiquitous in our visual world, conveying crucial information, such as in documents, websites, and everyday photographs. In this work, we propose UReader, a first exploration of universal OCR-free visually-situated language understanding based on the Multimodal Large Language Model (MLLM). By leveraging the shallow text recognition ability of the MLLM, we only finetuned 1.2% parameters and the training cost is much lower than previous work following domain-specific pretraining and finetuning paradigms. Concretely, UReader is jointly finetuned on a wide range of Visually-situated Language Understanding tasks via a unified instruction format. To enhance the visual text and semantic understanding, we further apply two auxiliary tasks with the same format, namely text reading and key points generation tasks. We design a shape-adaptive cropping module before the encoder-decoder architecture of MLLM to leverage the frozen low-resolution vision encoder for processing high-resolution images. Without downstream finetuning, our single model achieves state-of-the-art ocr-free performance in 8 out of 10 visually-situated language understanding tasks, across 5 domains: documents, tables, charts, natural images, and webpage screenshots. Codes and instruction-tuning datasets will be released.
NTIRE 2021 Challenge on Video Super-Resolution
Super-Resolution (SR) is a fundamental computer vision task that aims to obtain a high-resolution clean image from the given low-resolution counterpart. This paper reviews the NTIRE 2021 Challenge on Video Super-Resolution. We present evaluation results from two competition tracks as well as the proposed solutions. Track 1 aims to develop conventional video SR methods focusing on the restoration quality. Track 2 assumes a more challenging environment with lower frame rates, casting spatio-temporal SR problem. In each competition, 247 and 223 participants have registered, respectively. During the final testing phase, 14 teams competed in each track to achieve state-of-the-art performance on video SR tasks.
Contrast: A Hybrid Architecture of Transformers and State Space Models for Low-Level Vision
Transformers have become increasingly popular for image super-resolution (SR) tasks due to their strong global context modeling capabilities. However, their quadratic computational complexity necessitates the use of window-based attention mechanisms, which restricts the receptive field and limits effective context expansion. Recently, the Mamba architecture has emerged as a promising alternative with linear computational complexity, allowing it to avoid window mechanisms and maintain a large receptive field. Nevertheless, Mamba faces challenges in handling long-context dependencies when high pixel-level precision is required, as in SR tasks. This is due to its hidden state mechanism, which can compress and store a substantial amount of context but only in an approximate manner, leading to inaccuracies that transformers do not suffer from. In this paper, we propose Contrast, a hybrid SR model that combines Convolutional, Transformer, and State Space components, effectively blending the strengths of transformers and Mamba to address their individual limitations. By integrating transformer and state space mechanisms, Contrast compensates for the shortcomings of each approach, enhancing both global context modeling and pixel-level accuracy. We demonstrate that combining these two architectures allows us to mitigate the problems inherent in each, resulting in improved performance on image super-resolution tasks.
Towards True Detail Restoration for Super-Resolution: A Benchmark and a Quality Metric
Super-resolution (SR) has become a widely researched topic in recent years. SR methods can improve overall image and video quality and create new possibilities for further content analysis. But the SR mainstream focuses primarily on increasing the naturalness of the resulting image despite potentially losing context accuracy. Such methods may produce an incorrect digit, character, face, or other structural object even though they otherwise yield good visual quality. Incorrect detail restoration can cause errors when detecting and identifying objects both manually and automatically. To analyze the detail-restoration capabilities of image and video SR models, we developed a benchmark based on our own video dataset, which contains complex patterns that SR models generally fail to correctly restore. We assessed 32 recent SR models using our benchmark and compared their ability to preserve scene context. We also conducted a crowd-sourced comparison of restored details and developed an objective assessment metric that outperforms other quality metrics by correlation with subjective scores for this task. In conclusion, we provide a deep analysis of benchmark results that yields insights for future SR-based work.
CineScale: Free Lunch in High-Resolution Cinematic Visual Generation
Visual diffusion models achieve remarkable progress, yet they are typically trained at limited resolutions due to the lack of high-resolution data and constrained computation resources, hampering their ability to generate high-fidelity images or videos at higher resolutions. Recent efforts have explored tuning-free strategies to exhibit the untapped potential higher-resolution visual generation of pre-trained models. However, these methods are still prone to producing low-quality visual content with repetitive patterns. The key obstacle lies in the inevitable increase in high-frequency information when the model generates visual content exceeding its training resolution, leading to undesirable repetitive patterns deriving from the accumulated errors. In this work, we propose CineScale, a novel inference paradigm to enable higher-resolution visual generation. To tackle the various issues introduced by the two types of video generation architectures, we propose dedicated variants tailored to each. Unlike existing baseline methods that are confined to high-resolution T2I and T2V generation, CineScale broadens the scope by enabling high-resolution I2V and V2V synthesis, built atop state-of-the-art open-source video generation frameworks. Extensive experiments validate the superiority of our paradigm in extending the capabilities of higher-resolution visual generation for both image and video models. Remarkably, our approach enables 8k image generation without any fine-tuning, and achieves 4k video generation with only minimal LoRA fine-tuning. Generated video samples are available at our website: https://eyeline-labs.github.io/CineScale/.
Can Understanding and Generation Truly Benefit Together -- or Just Coexist?
In this paper, we introduce an insightful paradigm through the Auto-Encoder lens-understanding as the encoder (I2T) that compresses images into text, and generation as the decoder (T2I) that reconstructs images from that text. Using reconstruction fidelity as the unified training objective, we enforce the coherent bidirectional information flow between the understanding and generation processes, bringing mutual gains. To implement this, we propose UAE, a novel framework for unified multimodal learning. We begin by pre-training the decoder with large-scale long-context image captions to capture fine-grained semantic and complex spatial relationships. We then propose Unified-GRPO via reinforcement learning (RL), which covers three stages: (1) A cold-start phase to gently initialize both encoder and decoder with a semantic reconstruction loss; (2) Generation for Understanding, where the encoder is trained to generate informative captions that maximize the decoder's reconstruction quality, enhancing its visual understanding; (3) Understanding for Generation, where the decoder is refined to reconstruct from these captions, forcing it to leverage every detail and improving its long-context instruction following and generation fidelity. For evaluation, we introduce Unified-Bench, the first benchmark tailored to assess the degree of unification of the UMMs. A surprising "aha moment" arises within the multimodal learning domain: as RL progresses, the encoder autonomously produces more descriptive captions, while the decoder simultaneously demonstrates a profound ability to understand these intricate descriptions, resulting in reconstructions of striking fidelity.
Photo-Realistic Single Image Super-Resolution Using a Generative Adversarial Network
Despite the breakthroughs in accuracy and speed of single image super-resolution using faster and deeper convolutional neural networks, one central problem remains largely unsolved: how do we recover the finer texture details when we super-resolve at large upscaling factors? The behavior of optimization-based super-resolution methods is principally driven by the choice of the objective function. Recent work has largely focused on minimizing the mean squared reconstruction error. The resulting estimates have high peak signal-to-noise ratios, but they are often lacking high-frequency details and are perceptually unsatisfying in the sense that they fail to match the fidelity expected at the higher resolution. In this paper, we present SRGAN, a generative adversarial network (GAN) for image super-resolution (SR). To our knowledge, it is the first framework capable of inferring photo-realistic natural images for 4x upscaling factors. To achieve this, we propose a perceptual loss function which consists of an adversarial loss and a content loss. The adversarial loss pushes our solution to the natural image manifold using a discriminator network that is trained to differentiate between the super-resolved images and original photo-realistic images. In addition, we use a content loss motivated by perceptual similarity instead of similarity in pixel space. Our deep residual network is able to recover photo-realistic textures from heavily downsampled images on public benchmarks. An extensive mean-opinion-score (MOS) test shows hugely significant gains in perceptual quality using SRGAN. The MOS scores obtained with SRGAN are closer to those of the original high-resolution images than to those obtained with any state-of-the-art method.
LOVE-R1: Advancing Long Video Understanding with an Adaptive Zoom-in Mechanism via Multi-Step Reasoning
Long video understanding is still challenging for recent Large Video-Language Models (LVLMs) due to the conflict between long-form temporal understanding and detailed spatial perception. LVLMs with a uniform frame sampling mechanism, which samples frames with an equal frame size and fixed sampling rate, inevitably sacrifice either temporal clues or spatial details, resulting in suboptimal solutions. To mitigate this dilemma, we propose LOVE-R1, a model that can adaptively zoom in on a video clip. The model is first provided with densely sampled frames but in a small resolution. If some spatial details are needed, the model can zoom in on a clip of interest with a large frame resolution based on its reasoning until key visual information is obtained. The whole process is implemented as a multi-step reasoning process. To train the reasoning ability, we first finetune the model on our collected 38k high-quality CoT data and enhance it with decoupled reinforcement finetuning. As outcome rewards can not provide fine-grained process supervision, we decouple multi-step reasoning into multiple single-step reasoning and optimize the internal zoom-in ability explicitly. Experiments on long video understanding benchmarks show that our model with the slow-fast adaptive frame sampling mechanism achieves a great trade-off between sampling density and frame resolutions, and LOVE-R1 outperforms our baseline Qwen2.5-VL by an average of 3.1% points across 4 common long video understanding benchmarks.
Fully 1times1 Convolutional Network for Lightweight Image Super-Resolution
Deep models have achieved significant process on single image super-resolution (SISR) tasks, in particular large models with large kernel (3times3 or more). However, the heavy computational footprint of such models prevents their deployment in real-time, resource-constrained environments. Conversely, 1times1 convolutions bring substantial computational efficiency, but struggle with aggregating local spatial representations, an essential capability to SISR models. In response to this dichotomy, we propose to harmonize the merits of both 3times3 and 1times1 kernels, and exploit a great potential for lightweight SISR tasks. Specifically, we propose a simple yet effective fully 1times1 convolutional network, named Shift-Conv-based Network (SCNet). By incorporating a parameter-free spatial-shift operation, it equips the fully 1times1 convolutional network with powerful representation capability while impressive computational efficiency. Extensive experiments demonstrate that SCNets, despite its fully 1times1 convolutional structure, consistently matches or even surpasses the performance of existing lightweight SR models that employ regular convolutions.
ZoomEye: Enhancing Multimodal LLMs with Human-Like Zooming Capabilities through Tree-Based Image Exploration
An image, especially with high-resolution, typically consists of numerous visual elements, ranging from dominant large objects to fine-grained detailed objects. When perceiving such images, multimodal large language models~(MLLMs) face limitations due to the restricted input resolution of the pretrained vision encoder and the cluttered, dense context of the image, resulting in a focus on primary objects while easily overlooking detailed ones. In this paper, we propose Zoom Eye, a tree search algorithm designed to navigate the hierarchical and visual nature of images to capture relevant information. Zoom Eye conceptualizes an image as a tree, with each children node representing a zoomed sub-patch of the parent node and the root represents the overall image. Moreover, Zoom Eye is model-agnostic and training-free, so it enables any MLLMs to simulate human zooming actions by searching along the image tree from root to leaf nodes, seeking out pertinent information, and accurately responding to related queries. We experiment on a series of elaborate high-resolution benchmarks and the results demonstrate that Zoom Eye not only consistently improves the performance of a series base MLLMs with large margin~(e.g., LLaVA-v1.5-7B increases by 34.57\% on V^* Bench and 17.88\% on HR-Bench), but also enables small 7B MLLMs to outperform strong large models such as GPT-4o. Our code is available at https://github.com/om-ai-lab/ZoomEye{https://github.com/om-ai-lab/ZoomEye}.
Hyperspectral Image Super-Resolution with Spectral Mixup and Heterogeneous Datasets
This work studies Hyperspectral image (HSI) super-resolution (SR). HSI SR is characterized by high-dimensional data and a limited amount of training examples. This exacerbates the undesirable behaviors of neural networks such as memorization and sensitivity to out-of-distribution samples. This work addresses these issues with three contributions. First, we observe that HSI SR and RGB image SR are correlated and develop a novel multi-tasking network to train them jointly so that the auxiliary task RGB image SR can provide additional supervision. Second, we propose a simple, yet effective data augmentation routine, termed Spectral Mixup, to construct effective virtual training samples to enlarge the training set. Finally, we extend the network to a semi-supervised setting so that it can learn from datasets containing only low-resolution HSIs. With these contributions, our method is able to learn from heterogeneous datasets and lift the requirement for having a large amount of HD HSI training samples. Extensive experiments on four standard datasets show that our method outperforms existing methods significantly and underpin the relevance of our contributions. Code has been made available at https://github.com/kli8996/HSISR.
Densely Residual Laplacian Super-Resolution
Super-Resolution convolutional neural networks have recently demonstrated high-quality restoration for single images. However, existing algorithms often require very deep architectures and long training times. Furthermore, current convolutional neural networks for super-resolution are unable to exploit features at multiple scales and weigh them equally, limiting their learning capability. In this exposition, we present a compact and accurate super-resolution algorithm namely, Densely Residual Laplacian Network (DRLN). The proposed network employs cascading residual on the residual structure to allow the flow of low-frequency information to focus on learning high and mid-level features. In addition, deep supervision is achieved via the densely concatenated residual blocks settings, which also helps in learning from high-level complex features. Moreover, we propose Laplacian attention to model the crucial features to learn the inter and intra-level dependencies between the feature maps. Furthermore, comprehensive quantitative and qualitative evaluations on low-resolution, noisy low-resolution, and real historical image benchmark datasets illustrate that our DRLN algorithm performs favorably against the state-of-the-art methods visually and accurately.
DocVLM: Make Your VLM an Efficient Reader
Vision-Language Models (VLMs) excel in diverse visual tasks but face challenges in document understanding, which requires fine-grained text processing. While typical visual tasks perform well with low-resolution inputs, reading-intensive applications demand high-resolution, resulting in significant computational overhead. Using OCR-extracted text in VLM prompts partially addresses this issue but underperforms compared to full-resolution counterpart, as it lacks the complete visual context needed for optimal performance. We introduce DocVLM, a method that integrates an OCR-based modality into VLMs to enhance document processing while preserving original weights. Our approach employs an OCR encoder to capture textual content and layout, compressing these into a compact set of learned queries incorporated into the VLM. Comprehensive evaluations across leading VLMs show that DocVLM significantly reduces reliance on high-resolution images for document understanding. In limited-token regimes (448times448), DocVLM with 64 learned queries improves DocVQA results from 56.0% to 86.6% when integrated with InternVL2 and from 84.4% to 91.2% with Qwen2-VL. In LLaVA-OneVision, DocVLM achieves improved results while using 80% less image tokens. The reduced token usage allows processing multiple pages effectively, showing impressive zero-shot results on DUDE and state-of-the-art performance on MP-DocVQA, highlighting DocVLM's potential for applications requiring high-performance and efficiency.
Single Image Super-Resolution via a Holistic Attention Network
Informative features play a crucial role in the single image super-resolution task. Channel attention has been demonstrated to be effective for preserving information-rich features in each layer. However, channel attention treats each convolution layer as a separate process that misses the correlation among different layers. To address this problem, we propose a new holistic attention network (HAN), which consists of a layer attention module (LAM) and a channel-spatial attention module (CSAM), to model the holistic interdependencies among layers, channels, and positions. Specifically, the proposed LAM adaptively emphasizes hierarchical features by considering correlations among layers. Meanwhile, CSAM learns the confidence at all the positions of each channel to selectively capture more informative features. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed HAN performs favorably against the state-of-the-art single image super-resolution approaches.
You Only Need One Step: Fast Super-Resolution with Stable Diffusion via Scale Distillation
In this paper, we introduce YONOS-SR, a novel stable diffusion-based approach for image super-resolution that yields state-of-the-art results using only a single DDIM step. We propose a novel scale distillation approach to train our SR model. Instead of directly training our SR model on the scale factor of interest, we start by training a teacher model on a smaller magnification scale, thereby making the SR problem simpler for the teacher. We then train a student model for a higher magnification scale, using the predictions of the teacher as a target during the training. This process is repeated iteratively until we reach the target scale factor of the final model. The rationale behind our scale distillation is that the teacher aids the student diffusion model training by i) providing a target adapted to the current noise level rather than using the same target coming from ground truth data for all noise levels and ii) providing an accurate target as the teacher has a simpler task to solve. We empirically show that the distilled model significantly outperforms the model trained for high scales directly, specifically with few steps during inference. Having a strong diffusion model that requires only one step allows us to freeze the U-Net and fine-tune the decoder on top of it. We show that the combination of spatially distilled U-Net and fine-tuned decoder outperforms state-of-the-art methods requiring 200 steps with only one single step.
Extremely Lightweight Quantization Robust Real-Time Single-Image Super Resolution for Mobile Devices
Single-Image Super Resolution (SISR) is a classical computer vision problem and it has been studied for over decades. With the recent success of deep learning methods, recent work on SISR focuses solutions with deep learning methodologies and achieves state-of-the-art results. However most of the state-of-the-art SISR methods contain millions of parameters and layers, which limits their practical applications. In this paper, we propose a hardware (Synaptics Dolphin NPU) limitation aware, extremely lightweight quantization robust real-time super resolution network (XLSR). The proposed model's building block is inspired from root modules for Image classification. We successfully applied root modules to SISR problem, further more to make the model uint8 quantization robust we used Clipped ReLU at the last layer of the network and achieved great balance between reconstruction quality and runtime. Furthermore, although the proposed network contains 30x fewer parameters than VDSR its performance surpasses it on Div2K validation set. The network proved itself by winning Mobile AI 2021 Real-Time Single Image Super Resolution Challenge.
Retrieval-Augmented Perception: High-Resolution Image Perception Meets Visual RAG
High-resolution (HR) image perception remains a key challenge in multimodal large language models (MLLMs). To overcome the limitations of existing methods, this paper shifts away from prior dedicated heuristic approaches and revisits the most fundamental idea to HR perception by enhancing the long-context capability of MLLMs, driven by recent advances in long-context techniques like retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) for general LLMs. Towards this end, this paper presents the first study exploring the use of RAG to address HR perception challenges. Specifically, we propose Retrieval-Augmented Perception (RAP), a training-free framework that retrieves and fuses relevant image crops while preserving spatial context using the proposed Spatial-Awareness Layout. To accommodate different tasks, the proposed Retrieved-Exploration Search (RE-Search) dynamically selects the optimal number of crops based on model confidence and retrieval scores. Experimental results on HR benchmarks demonstrate the significant effectiveness of RAP, with LLaVA-v1.5-13B achieving a 43% improvement on V^* Bench and 19% on HR-Bench.
