Joint Geometric and Trajectory Consistency Learning for One-Step Real-World Super-Resolution

2026-02-27Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
AI summary

The authors studied how to improve making blurry or low-quality real-world images clearer using a special type of AI called diffusion models. These models give good results but take a long time to run. They suggest a new method called GTASR that trains the model differently to keep the image details more accurate and consistent, making the process faster and better. Their tests show GTASR works well compared to older approaches while being quicker to use.

Real-World Image Super-ResolutionDiffusion ModelsConsistency ModelsTrajectory AlignmentStructural RectificationGenerative ModelsImage RestorationModel DistillationLatent SpaceAI Inference Efficiency
Authors
Chengyan Deng, Zhangquan Chen, Li Yu, Kai Zhang, Xue Zhou, Wang Zhang
Abstract
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.