MFSR: MeanFlow Distillation for One Step Real-World Image Super Resolution

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Wang, Ruiqing, Zhang, Kai, Zhu, Yuanzhi, Yan, Hanshu, Lu, Shilin, Yang, Jian
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
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author Wang, Ruiqing
Zhang, Kai
Zhu, Yuanzhi
Yan, Hanshu
Lu, Shilin
Yang, Jian
author_facet Wang, Ruiqing
Zhang, Kai
Zhu, Yuanzhi
Yan, Hanshu
Lu, Shilin
Yang, Jian
contents Diffusion- and flow-based models have advanced Real-world Image Super-Resolution (Real-ISR), but their multi-step sampling makes inference slow and hard to deploy. One-step distillation alleviates the cost, yet often degrades restoration quality and removes the option to refine with more steps. We present Mean Flows for Super-Resolution (MFSR), a new distillation framework that produces photorealistic results in a single step while still allowing an optional few-step path for further improvement. Our approach uses MeanFlow as the learning target, enabling the student to approximate the average velocity between arbitrary states of the Probability Flow ODE (PF-ODE) and effectively capture the teacher's dynamics without explicit rollouts. To better leverage pretrained generative priors, we additionally improve original MeanFlow's Classifier-Free Guidance (CFG) formulation with teacher CFG distillation strategy, which enhances restoration capability and preserves fine details. Experiments on both synthetic and real-world benchmarks demonstrate that MFSR achieves efficient, flexible, and high-quality super-resolution, delivering results on par with or even better than multi-step teachers while requiring much lower computational cost.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2603_20690
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle MFSR: MeanFlow Distillation for One Step Real-World Image Super Resolution
Wang, Ruiqing
Zhang, Kai
Zhu, Yuanzhi
Yan, Hanshu
Lu, Shilin
Yang, Jian
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Diffusion- and flow-based models have advanced Real-world Image Super-Resolution (Real-ISR), but their multi-step sampling makes inference slow and hard to deploy. One-step distillation alleviates the cost, yet often degrades restoration quality and removes the option to refine with more steps. We present Mean Flows for Super-Resolution (MFSR), a new distillation framework that produces photorealistic results in a single step while still allowing an optional few-step path for further improvement. Our approach uses MeanFlow as the learning target, enabling the student to approximate the average velocity between arbitrary states of the Probability Flow ODE (PF-ODE) and effectively capture the teacher's dynamics without explicit rollouts. To better leverage pretrained generative priors, we additionally improve original MeanFlow's Classifier-Free Guidance (CFG) formulation with teacher CFG distillation strategy, which enhances restoration capability and preserves fine details. Experiments on both synthetic and real-world benchmarks demonstrate that MFSR achieves efficient, flexible, and high-quality super-resolution, delivering results on par with or even better than multi-step teachers while requiring much lower computational cost.
title MFSR: MeanFlow Distillation for One Step Real-World Image Super Resolution
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.20690