TinySR: Pruning Diffusion for Real-World Image Super-Resolution

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Dong, Linwei, Fan, Qingnan, Yu, Yuhang, Zhang, Qi, Chen, Jinwei, Luo, Yawei, Zou, Changqing
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Dong, Linwei
Fan, Qingnan
Yu, Yuhang
Zhang, Qi
Chen, Jinwei
Luo, Yawei
Zou, Changqing
author_facet Dong, Linwei
Fan, Qingnan
Yu, Yuhang
Zhang, Qi
Chen, Jinwei
Luo, Yawei
Zou, Changqing
contents Real-world image super-resolution (Real-ISR) focuses on recovering high-quality images from low-resolution inputs that suffer from complex degradations like noise, blur, and compression. Recently, diffusion models (DMs) have shown great potential in this area by leveraging strong generative priors to restore fine details. However, their iterative denoising process incurs high computational overhead, posing challenges for real-time applications. Although one-step distillation methods, such as OSEDiff and TSD-SR, offer faster inference, they remain fundamentally constrained by their large, over-parameterized model architectures. In this work, we present TinySR, a compact yet effective diffusion model specifically designed for Real-ISR that achieves real-time performance while maintaining perceptual quality. We introduce a Dynamic Inter-block Activation and an Expansion-Corrosion Strategy to facilitate more effective decision-making in depth pruning. We achieve VAE compression through channel pruning, attention removal and lightweight SepConv. We eliminate time- and prompt-related modules and perform pre-caching techniques to further speed up the model. TinySR significantly reduces computational cost and model size, achieving up to 5.68x speedup and 83% parameter reduction compared to its teacher TSD-SR, while still providing high quality results.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2508_17434
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle TinySR: Pruning Diffusion for Real-World Image Super-Resolution
Dong, Linwei
Fan, Qingnan
Yu, Yuhang
Zhang, Qi
Chen, Jinwei
Luo, Yawei
Zou, Changqing
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Real-world image super-resolution (Real-ISR) focuses on recovering high-quality images from low-resolution inputs that suffer from complex degradations like noise, blur, and compression. Recently, diffusion models (DMs) have shown great potential in this area by leveraging strong generative priors to restore fine details. However, their iterative denoising process incurs high computational overhead, posing challenges for real-time applications. Although one-step distillation methods, such as OSEDiff and TSD-SR, offer faster inference, they remain fundamentally constrained by their large, over-parameterized model architectures. In this work, we present TinySR, a compact yet effective diffusion model specifically designed for Real-ISR that achieves real-time performance while maintaining perceptual quality. We introduce a Dynamic Inter-block Activation and an Expansion-Corrosion Strategy to facilitate more effective decision-making in depth pruning. We achieve VAE compression through channel pruning, attention removal and lightweight SepConv. We eliminate time- and prompt-related modules and perform pre-caching techniques to further speed up the model. TinySR significantly reduces computational cost and model size, achieving up to 5.68x speedup and 83% parameter reduction compared to its teacher TSD-SR, while still providing high quality results.
title TinySR: Pruning Diffusion for Real-World Image Super-Resolution
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.17434