DriftSR: One-Step Real-World Image Super-Resolution via Distribution Drifting

Real-world image super-resolution (Real-ISR) aims to reconstruct high-quality (HQ) images from low-quality (LQ) inputs subject to diverse real-world degradations. Recent advances have leveraged the LQ inputs and natural image priors learned by Stable Diffusion models to achieve impressive results. However, existing methods often overlook insufficient clarity of LQ inputs inevitably induce content drift in the generated HQ images. This manifests primarily as visual detail degradation and textual semantic shift, severely compromising both fidelity and perceptual quality. To address this challenge, we propose FSP-Diff, a novel one-step diffusion model featuring a dual-pathway architecture. This architecture comprises a Detail-Conditioned Pathway for injecting structured details to recover fine structures, and a Detail-Modulated Semantic Pathway that refines semantic guidance using structured details to mitigate semantic deviations. Extensive experiments on standard Real-ISR benchmarks demonstrate that FSP-Diff surpasses existing one-step diffusion methods in both quantitative and qualitative metrics.

Diffusion models excel in Real-World Image Super-Resolution (Real-ISR) due to their powerful generative priors but suffer from slow iterative sampling. Although existing one-step distillation methods accelerate inference, they typically require auxiliary teacher models that inflate training memory and restrict scalability to large-scale architectures. Furthermore, these fixed-step models lack the flexibility to trade off speed for quality. In this paper, we propose TEASR, a training-efficient any-step diffusion framework for Real-ISR that enables both one-step and multi-step restoration within a unified model. Our key idea is to perform self-adversarial distillation within a single diffusion model, eliminating the need for auxiliary teachers or discriminators. Specifically, we propose a timestep-aware rectification strategy that stabilizes one-step generation across noise levels. These two designs further enables the distillation of 20B-parameter diffusion models on a single GPU, significantly improving training efficiency. Moreover, we introduce a dual-branch diffusion transformer with decoupled timestep condition to separate the current noise state and the denoising target to enhance sampling quality. Extensive experiments demonstrate that TEASR supports seamless any-step sampling and consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods across multiple datasets.

Diffusion-based Real-World Image Super-Resolution (Real-ISR) achieves impressive perceptual quality but suffers from high computational costs due to iterative sampling. While recent distillation approaches leveraging large-scale Text-to-Image (T2I) priors have enabled one-step generation, they are typically hindered by prohibitive parameter counts and the inherent capability bounds imposed by teacher models. As a lightweight alternative, Consistency Models offer efficient inference but struggle with two critical limitations: the accumulation of consistency drift inherent to transitive training, and a phenomenon we term "Geometric Decoupling" - where the generative trajectory achieves pixel-wise alignment yet fails to preserve structural coherence. To address these challenges, we propose GTASR (Geometric Trajectory Alignment Super-Resolution), a simple yet effective consistency training paradigm for Real-ISR. Specifically, we introduce a Trajectory Alignment (TA) strategy to rectify the tangent vector field via full-path projection, and a Dual-Reference Structural Rectification (DRSR) mechanism to enforce strict structural constraints. Extensive experiments verify that GTASR delivers superior performance over representative baselines while maintaining minimal latency. The code and model will be released at https://github.com/Blazedengcy/GTASR.