RefGC-SR$^2$: Reference-guided Generated Content Super-Resolution and Refinement

Jeahun Sung; Dahyeon Kye; Soo Ye Kim; Jihyong Oh

cs.CVJun 13, 2026

RefGC-SR $^2$ : Reference-guided Generated Content Super-Resolution and Refinement

Authors: Jeahun Sung, Dahyeon Kye, Soo Ye Kim, Jihyong Oh

Organizations: CMLab, Chung-Ang University · Adobe Research

Abstract

Reference-guided generation (e.g., object compositing, customization) has progressed rapidly, yet current pipelines share a fundamental limitation: the object-centric high-resolution reference image (HRRI) provided by users is downsampled to a fixed low-resolution (LR) before being fed into the model, so the fine-grained details are discarded before the output is even produced. In addition, the generation step then introduces its own artifacts (e.g., identity distortion) on top of this loss. Existing reference-guided generated content refinement (RefGCR) methods can correct some of these artifacts but still operate in the LR domain; reference-guided super-resolution (RefSR) methods recover resolution but assume natural-image degradations and ignore the artifact distribution of generative pipelines. To address both gaps in a single formulation, we introduce a new task: reference-guided generated content super-resolution-refinement (RefGC-SR $^2$ ), where the original HRRI is reused at the post-processing stage to recover lost details, refine generative artifacts, and upscale the output simultaneously. We construct the first real-world triplet data generation pipeline for this RefGC-SR $^2$ task, training a diptych-conditioned generator to synthesize paired low-quality anchors that public pretrained models cannot provide. We further present a frequency-aware diffusion transformer model for RefGC-SR $^2$ that selectively injects fine details from the HRRI while removing generative artifacts. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our RefGC-SR $^2$ model successfully (i) refines the object identity faithfully with respect to the reference, and (ii) recovers high-resolution details, so that the final result is significantly higher quality and practically more usable compared to existing RefGCR and RefSR baselines.

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