Diffusion-based approaches have recently driven remarkable progress in real-world image super-resolution (SR). However, existing methods still struggle to simultaneously preserve fine details and ensure high-fidelity reconstruction, often resulting in suboptimal visual quality. In this paper, we propose FiDeSR, a high-fidelity and detail-preserving one-step diffusion super-resolution framework. During training, we introduce a detail-aware weighting strategy that adaptively emphasizes regions where the model exhibits higher prediction errors. During inference, low- and high-frequency adaptive enhancers further refine the reconstruction without requiring model retraining, enabling flexible enhancement control. To further improve the reconstruction accuracy, FiDeSR incorporates a residual-in-residual noise refinement, which corrects prediction errors in the diffusion noise and enhances fine detail recovery. FiDeSR achieves superior real-world SR performance compared to existing diffusion-based methods, producing outputs with both high perceptual quality and faithful content restoration. The source code will be released at: https://github.com/Ar0Kim/FiDeSR.
Figures & tables
Figure 2: Example failure cases of diffusion-based Real-ISR methods. (b) AddSR introduces structural distortion and low-frequency inconsistency. (c) OSEDiff loses high-frequency details, producing over-smoothed texture. (d) PiSA-SR generates excessive details. In contrast, (e) our method achieves both high fidelity and detail-preserving.
Figure 3: Overall framework of FiDeSR. (a) Training process: LQ image xL is encoded into a latent zL , and the Diffusion Network predicts a coarse residual r , which is refined by LRRB to create refined latent zr . The training loss is guided by the DAW module to emphasize fine structural details, and the refined latent zr is decoded by the VAE Decoder. (b) Inference process: Following the single-step diffusion process, the LQ latent zL is processed by the Diffusion Network to predict a residual, which is then refined by the LRRB. Refined zr is enhanced by frequency components through the LFIM, and finally decoded by the VAE Decoder to produce the Super-Resolution (SR) image xSR .
Figure 4: Comparison of the pipeline among ESRGAN, PiSA-SR, and our FiDeSR. (a) ESRGAN employs RRDB-based restoration in pixel space. (b) PiSA-SR uses a one-step diffusion network to predict a global residual in the latent space. (c) Our FiDeSR introduces latent residual refinement block (LRRB) that progressively refines the residual.
Dataset
Method
PSNR ↑
SSIM ↑
LPIPS ↓
DISTS ↓
CLIPIQA ↑
NIQE ↓
MUSIQ ↑
MANIQA ↑
FID ↓
DRealSR
StableSR-200s
27.93
0.7491
0.3306
0.2290
0.6197
6.3865
58.5502
0.5569
147.48
SeeSR-50s
28.14
0.7713
0.3141
0.2298
0.6889
6.4633
64.7302
0.6016
146.98
DiffBIR-50s
25.90
0.6245
0.4669
0.2298
0.6333
6.3275
66.1334
0.6221
180.34
PASD-20s
29.17
0.7954
0.3176
0.2220
0.7071
7.7138
50.4422
0.4683
143.08
AddSR-4s
26.62
0.7384
0.3695
0.2651
0.7121
7.8536
65.0625
0.5993
167.69
OSEDiff-1s
27.92
0.7835
0.2967
0.2162
0.6956
6.4389
64.6979
0.5898
135.45
Table 1: Quantitative comparison with state-of-the-art DM-based SR methods on synthetic and real-world test datasets. The number of diffusion inference steps is indicated by ’s’. The best and second best results of each metric are highlighted in red and blue , respectively. The third best results are indicated by an underline .
Figure 5: Qualitative comparisons with state-of-the-art DM-based SR methods.
Model
CLIPIQA ↑
NIQE ↓
MUSIQ ↑
MANIQA ↑
w/o LRRB, DAW
0.6611
4.7381
67.6043
0.6237
w/o LRRB
0.6641
4.7129
67.6280
0.6236
w/o DAW
0.6626
4.7340
67.9515
0.6278
FiDeSR
0.6699
4.6300
68.2869
0.6285
Table 2: Ablation study on LRRB and DAW on the DIV2K dataset (evaluated before applying LFIM).
Method
DIV2K
DRealSR
RealSR
Average
baseline
0.1051
0.1049
0.1029
0.1049
LRRB
0.1038
0.1028
0.1045
0.1032
Improvement
1.24%
1.99%
1.62%
1.62%
Table 3: High-frequency noise prediction error comparison between baseline and LRRB models. Lower MSE indicates better performance.
Method
PSNR ↑
SSIM ↑
MUSIQ ↑
MANIQA ↑
Baseline
26.2542
0.7498
69.3610
0.6580
HF-0.1
26.1295
0.7476
69.6450
0.6639
HF-0.2
25.9985
0.7452
69.8562
0.6692
HF-0.3
25.8618
0.7428
70.0120
0.6737
HF-0.4
25.7213
0.7403
70.1132
0.6774
HF-0.5
25.5778
0.7378
70.1617
0.6803
Table 4: Ablation of LFIM (HF/LF) modules with different injection on the RealSR dataset.
Appendix figures & tables12 assets
Supplementary material from the paper’s appendix.
Appendix
Figure 6: Ground-truth images used in the user study along with the voting results for their corresponding restored outputs.
Dataset
Method
PSNR ↑
SSIM ↑
LPIPS ↓
DISTS ↓
CLIPIQA ↑
NIQE ↓
MUSIQ ↑
MANIQA ↑
FID ↓
DrealSR
Real-ESRGAN
28.61
0.8051
0.2819
0.2089
0.4519
6.6896
54.2678
0.4904
147.68
BSRGAN
28.70
0.8028
0.2858
0.2144
0.5093
6.5387
57.1626
0.4844
155.59
LDL
28.20
0.8124
0.2792
0.2127
0.4475
7.1360
53.9464
0.4894
155.53
FiDeSR
28.90
0.7907
0.2836
0.2112
0.6974
6.2014
65.7820
0.6239
127.97
RealSR
Real-ESRGAN
25.68
0.7614
0.2709
0.2060
0.4485
5.7936
60.3674
0.5505
135.20
BSRGAN
26.37
0.7651
0.2656
0.2124
0.5119
5.6361
63.2870
0.5420
141.30
Appendix
Table 5: Quantitative comparison with GAN-based Real-ISR Methods. Best results are highlighted in red .
Figure 7: Qualitative comparisons between FiDeSR and GAN-based Real-ISR methods.
Figure 8: Qualitative comparisons between FiDeSR and different diffusion-based methods on DIV2K dataset. FiDeSR effectively reconstructs fine details while preserving overall image fidelity.
Figure 9: Qualitative comparisons between FiDeSR and different diffusion-based methods on DRealSR and RealSR dataset. FiDeSR effectively reconstructs fine details while preserving overall image fidelity.
Figure 10: Spatial distribution of high-frequency noise prediction error improvement by LRRB. ΔEHF represents the difference between baseline and LRRB error magnitudes in the high-frequency domain (top 20% frequencies, rc=0.8 ). Positive values (red) indicate regions where LRRB reduces prediction error, while negative values (blue) indicate regions where error increases. Color intensity represents the magnitude of change in log scale.
Figure 11: Visualization of the Detail-aware Weighting (DAW) module. Detail Map generated by spatial filters (Sobel, Laplacian, Variance), is element-wise multiplied by the Error Map to create the Difficulty Weight Map.
Figure 12: Qualitative ablation study illustrating the contributions of the LRRB and DAW modules. Even under challenging degradation conditions, the full FiDeSR model reconstructs finer details and preserves texture fidelity most effectively.
Metric
StableSR
DiffBIR
SeeSR
PASD
AddSR
SinSR
OSEDiff
PISA-SR
FiDeSR (Ours)
Inference Step
200
50
50
20
4
1
1
1
1
Inference Time (s)
7.52
2.04
3.30
2.10
0.76
0.097
0.087
0.057
0.078
#Params (B)
1.56
1.68
2.51
2.31
2.28
0.18
1.77
1.30
1.29
Appendix
Table 6: Comparison of inference steps, runtime, and model parameters among diffusion-based SR methods.
LoRA Rank
PSNR ↑
SSIM ↑
LPIPS ↓
DISTS ↓
CLIPIQA ↑
NIQE ↓
MUSIQ ↑
MANIQA ↑
FID ↓
4
26.5196
0.7577
0.2573
0.1967
0.6554
5.3488
68.4282
0.6442
112.9637
8
26.2542
0.7498
0.2604
0.1963
0.6764
5.3332
69.3610
0.6580
108.7867
16
26.4582
0.7563
0.2508
0.1920
0.6660
4.6858
68.0145
0.6525
108.6132
Appendix
Table 7: Ablation study of LoRA rank for FiDeSR on the RealSR dataset (evaluated before applying LFIM).
LF/HF Ratio
PSNR ↑
SSIM ↑
CLIPIQA ↑
MUSIQ ↑
MANIQA ↑
(0.2, 0.2)
26.0249
0.7457
0.6896
69.8245
0.6681
(0.4, 0.2)
26.0658
0.7464
0.6877
69.7645
0.6666
(0.4, 0.4)
25.8630
0.7428
0.6934
70.0136
0.6737
(0.6, 0.6)
25.6519
0.7391
0.6956
70.1429
0.6789
Appendix
Table 8: Ablation study on different LF/HF injection strength ratios of LFIM (lf_alpha,hf_beta) on the RealSR dataset.
Dataset
Method
PSNR ↑
LPIPS ↓
NIQE ↓
MANIQA ↑
FID ↓
DRealSR
TFDSR
27.88
0.3417
6.2667
0.6164
155.66
FiDeSR
28.90
0.2836
6.2014
0.6239
127.97
Appendix
Table 9: Comparison between FiDeSR and TFDSR on SR benchmarks.
Large-scale pre-trained diffusion models have been extensively adopted for real-world image Super-Resolution because of their powerful generative priors through textual guidance. However, when super-resolving high-resolution images with patch-wise inference strategy, most existing diffusion-based SR methods tend to suffer from over-generation, due to the misalignment between the global prompt from LR image and the incomplete semantic information of local patches during each inference step. On the other hand, most existing methods also failed to generate detailed texture in local patches due to the overemphasis on global generation capabilities in network designs and training strategies. To address this issue, we present DreamSR, a novel SR model that suppresses local over-generation and improves fine-detail synthesis, thereby achieving visually faithful results with ultra-high-quality details. Specifically, we propose a dual-branch MM-ControlNet, where the ControlNet generates local textual feature with patch-level prompts while the pre-trained DiT provides global textual feature with global prompts, thereby mitigating over-generation and ensuring semantic consistency across patches. We also design a comprehensive training strategy with stage-specific data processing pipelines and a Receptive-Field Enhancement strategy, enhancing the model's capability to capture patch information and effectively restore local textures. Extensive experiments demonstrate that DreamSR outperforms state-of-the-art methods, providing high-quality SR results. Code and model are available at https://github.com/jerrydong0219/DreamSR.
Despite recent advances, single-image super-resolution (SR) remains challenging, especially in real-world scenarios with complex degradations. Diffusion-based SR methods, particularly those built on Stable Diffusion, leverage strong generative priors but commonly rely on text conditioning derived from semantic captioning. Such textual descriptions provide only high-level semantics and lack the spatially aligned visual information required for faithful restoration, leading to a representation gap between abstract semantics and spatially aligned visual details. To address this limitation, we propose GramSR, a one-step diffusion-based SR framework that replaces text conditioning with dense visual features extracted from the low-resolution input using a pre-trained DINOv3 encoder. GramSR adopts a three-stage LoRA architecture, where pixel-level, semantic-level, and texture-level LoRA modules are trained sequentially. The pixel-level module focuses on degradation removal using ℓ2 loss, the semantic-level module enhances perceptual details via LPIPS and CSD losses, and the texture-level module enforces feature correlation consistency through a Gram matrix loss computed from DINOv3 features. At inference, independent guidance scales enable flexible control over degradation removal, semantic enhancement, and texture preservation. Extensive experiments on standard SR benchmarks demonstrate that GramSR consistently outperforms existing one-step diffusion-based methods, achieving superior structural fidelity and texture realism. The code for this work is available at: https://github.com/aimagelab/GramSR.
Diffusion models (DMs) have demonstrated remarkable success in real-world image super-resolution (SR), yet their reliance on time-consuming multi-step sampling largely hinders their practical applications. While recent efforts have introduced few- or single-step solutions, existing methods either inefficiently model the process from noisy input or fail to fully exploit iterative generative priors, compromising the fidelity and quality of the reconstructed images. To address this issue, we propose FlowSR, a novel approach that reformulates the SR problem as a rectified flow from low-resolution (LR) to high-resolution (HR) images. Our method leverages an improved consistency learning strategy to enable high-quality SR in a single step. Specifically, we refine the original consistency distillation process by incorporating HR regularization, ensuring that the learned SR flow not only enforces self-consistency but also converges precisely to the ground-truth HR target. Furthermore, we introduce a fast-slow scheduling strategy, where adjacent timesteps for consistency learning are sampled from two distinct schedulers: a fast scheduler with fewer timesteps to improve efficiency, and a slow scheduler with more timesteps to capture fine-grained texture details. Extensive experiments demonstrate that FlowSR achieves outstanding performance in both efficiency and image quality. Code: this https URL.
Jiaqi Xu, Wenbo Li, Haoze Sun +8
The Chinese University of Hong Kong · Huawei Noah’s Ark Lab · HKUST (GZ) +1