Jun 2026· arXiv.org· Vol abs/2606.29198· 0 citations· 52 references
Computer Science
TL;DR
This work presents Dynamic Trajectory Initialization (DTI) paradigm for GFVSR, which reformulates GFVSR as an input-driven directional restoration and demonstrates the perception-distortion trade-off and that the LPIPS is the most convincing metric in this case.
Abstract
As the most perceptually powerful Face Video Super-Resolution (FVSR) method, existing works in Generative FVSR (GFVSR) mainly exploit the generative prior of pretrained diffusion models. However, viewed as full generation, they suffer from fixed sampling and expensive inference costs if without large-scale auxiliary training. Furthermore, an excessive pursuit of generic perceptual metrics often results in low fidelity. To address these issues, we present Dynamic Trajectory Initialization (DTI) paradigm for GFVSR, which reformulates GFVSR as an input-driven directional restoration. With a novel enhancement-and-injection conditioning mechanism for pretrained DiT backbone, fidelity of our model has been significantly improved without compromising perceptual quality. To dynamically set the starting sampling point, we propose a Discriminative Guide (DG) trained via objective Signal-to-Noise Ratio (SNR) alignment. With only minor model adaptation and fine-tuning, our method achieves a SOTA overall performance across diverse metrics and benchmarks. An analysis of relationship between actual comprehensive quality and common metrics is also conducted, which demonstrates the perception-distortion trade-off and that the LPIPS is the most convincing metric in our case.
Despite the success of diffusion models in Video Frame Interpolation (VFI), existing methods still suffer from two critical limitations. First, latent diffusion inevitably loses fine-grained details when reconstructing images from latent representations back to the pixel space. Second, multi-step sampling incurs prohibitive memory consumption and inference latency. To address these issues, we propose SPEED, a one-step pixel diffusion framework for high-quality VFI. Specifically, SPEED employs a progressive multi-stage architecture with dynamic patch scaling to effectively learn multi-scale motion, structural, and appearance representations. Furthermore, we propose a novel Noise-Update-Only Attention mechanism to prevent semantic degradation of the clean condition frames while reducing the computational overhead by nearly 50%. Besides, we introduce a Drift-aware Timestep Sampling strategy coupled with a tailored training objective to directly predict images in the pixel space, enabling one-step inference without compromising the quality of the generated frames. Extensive experiments show that SPEED achieves state-of-the-art performance. On SNU-FILM, SPEED reduces LPIPS by 8.8% while delivering 63.3% faster inference and 10.6% lower memory usage. On challenging 4K benchmarks, it further surpasses prior methods by up to 51.5% in LPIPS.
Zihao Zhang, Haoyu Zhao, Siqian Yang et al.· 0 citations
Image super-resolution (ISR) has witnessed remarkable progress with diffusion models and flow matching. The dominant text-to-image (T2I) based approaches leverage large-scale foundation models as generative priors, achieving impressive perceptual quality but at the cost of massive model sizes and prohibitive training expenses. Recent flow-matching-based vision-only approaches have made significant strides; however, they adopt standard flow formulations that transport from a pure Gaussian prior to the data distribution, discarding the rich structural information already present in the low-quality (LQ) input. Furthermore, existing single-step acceleration techniques often forfeit the model's multi-step inference capability. In this paper, we propose Residual Flow Matching for Image Super-Resolution (RFMSR), a vision-only framework that centers the source distribution at the LQ latent, reducing transport distance and preserving structural priors throughout the flow trajectory. We further introduce a two-phase training strategy: Phase I pretrains the velocity field via conditional flow matching, while Phase II applies end-to-end supervision to the single-step prediction while retaining the velocity loss across all timesteps, achieving high-quality single-step generation without sacrificing multi-step refinement. Extensive experiments demonstrate that RFMSR achieves comparable or even superior perceptual quality compared to state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods. The source code is available at https://github.com/Faze-Hsw/RFMSR.
Shuwei Huang, Tianyao Luo, Jicheng Liu et al.· 1 citation
Diffusion-based super-resolution (SR) achieves strong perceptual quality but requires costly iterative denoising. Existing one-step distillation methods reduce inference time but depend on expensive pretrained teachers, whereas CTMSR avoids distillation through PF-ODE consistency training yet does not explicitly model the restoration dynamics from low-resolution (LR) inputs to high-resolution (HR) images. We propose MeanSR, a one-step perceptual SR method that learns an LR-conditioned average velocity field to directly capture the finite-time transition from degraded or noisy inputs to plausible HR outputs. We further reformulate distribution trajectory matching for average-velocity generation and introduce a Stage-Aware Temporal Sampling strategy to improve trajectory learning. Experiments on synthetic and real-world benchmarks show that MeanSR outperforms CTMSR on CLIPIQA, MUSIQ, and MANIQA while substantially reducing FLOPs and inference latency. MeanSR also reconstructs sharper structures and more realistic textures with fewer perceptual artifacts.
Axi Niu, Jiawei Kou, Kang Zhang et al.· 0 citations
MotionCraft is presented, a controllable VSR framework that formulates restoration as motion-aware latent state prediction inspired by world models and integrates adaptive sparse attention with an explicit user-accessible control interface to deliver temporally consistent, high-quality reconstructions under streaming constraints.
Rong Fu, Chunlei Meng, Yangcheng Zeng et al.· 0 citations
Video face restoration (VFR) aims to recover high-quality and temporally consistent facial details from severely degraded video sequences; however, existing methods still struggle to balance spatial fidelity and temporal coherence under complex degradations. To address this, we propose FADRA, a frequency-aware diffusion framework with iterative residual adaptation specifically tailored for robust VFR. We first leverage the strong temporal consistency of a pre-trained text-to-video diffusion model and introduce lightweight LoRA adapters together with a Low-Quality (LQ) Pixel-Alignment Feature Fusion module to efficiently adapt the frozen generative prior to the VFR task. To further adapt the frozen diffusion backbone to the downstream VFR task beyond LoRA-based adaptation, we introduce a Repeated Residual Adaptation Head (RRAH) for step-wise residual refinement after the diffusion backbone. To make this refinement explicitly guided by the degraded observation, RRAH further takes the LQ latent together with the current velocity prediction as input, allowing the model to repeatedly revisit LQ cues and predict residual updates at each flow-matching step. This LQ-guided repeated residual adaptation helps recover fine facial details while preserving the inherent temporal priors of the pre-trained model. Furthermore, to ensure the structural integrity of perceptually important details, we introduce a Frequency-Aware Loss that provides explicit supervision across multiple spectral bands, emphasizing visually sensitive frequency components that are crucial for perceptual quality and prone to temporal jittering. Extensive experiments demonstrate that FADRA recovers better facial structures and produces more temporally consistent videos than state-of-the-art methods, leading to clear gains in both quantitative metrics and visual perception.
Jin Jiang, Jia Wang, Panwen Hu et al.· 0 citations
Facial sketch synthesis is important for cross-modal face analysis and digital forensics, yet existing models often suffer from structural distortions and identity inconsistency under limited paired training data. Traditional methods, primarily based on generative adversarial networks, often suffer from training instability and insufficient detail reconstruction. To address these limitations, this study proposes a diffusion-based framework with a stage-wise multi-condition guidance mechanism that enhances both structural and textural fidelity. Specifically, (i) during the downsampling phase, semantic segmentation features are fused to guide the model with accurate structural information, such as facial part locations; and (ii) during upsampling, a hybrid cross-attention mechanism is employed to integrate coarse image textures with denoised noise, refining fine-grained details. Additionally, we incorporate the Vision Transformer within the U-Net backbone to better capture global contextual information in low-frequency regions, further enhancing image realism. Experiments on multiple benchmark datasets demonstrate strong overall performance in SSIM and FSIM, indicating improved structural similarity and feature-level fidelity under the evaluated settings. Moreover, our method obtains competitive LPIPS results, indicating improved perceptual similarity. We further compare with recent image-to-image translation and diffusion-based baselines and observe competitive performance in both visual coherence and identity preservation.
Yue Que, Xuegui Cheng, Shuqian Shi et al.· Neural Networks· 0 citations