# A Close Look at Few-shot Real Image Super-resolution from the Distortion Relation Perspective

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2111.13078 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.13078/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 58 of its 80 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 25 Nov 2021.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 58)

- [Very Deep Convolutional Networks for Large-Scale Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.1556/) (2014)
- [Semi-Supervised Classification with Graph Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1609.02907/) (2016)
- [The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Deep Features as a Perceptual Metric](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.03924/) (2018)
- [Inductive Representation Learning on Large Graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.02216/) (2017)
- [Model-Agnostic Meta-Learning for Fast Adaptation of Deep Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.03400/) (2017)
- [Prototypical Networks for Few-shot Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.05175/) (2017)
- [SwinIR: Image Restoration Using Swin Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.10257/) (2021)
- [Enhanced Deep Residual Networks for Single Image Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1707.02921/) (2017)
- [Beyond a Gaussian Denoiser: Residual Learning of Deep CNN for Image Denoising](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.03981/) (2016)
- [Image Super-Resolution Using Very Deep Residual Channel Attention Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.02758/) (2018)
- [Image Super-Resolution Using Deep Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1501.00092/) (2014)
- [Deep Image Prior](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.10925/) (2017)
- [Real-ESRGAN: Training Real-World Blind Super-Resolution with Pure Synthetic Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.10833/) (2021)
- [Accurate Image Super-Resolution Using Very Deep Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1511.04587/) (2015)
- [Pre-Trained Image Processing Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.00364/) (2020)
- [Uformer: A General U-Shaped Transformer for Image Restoration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.03106/) (2021)
- [Image Quality Assessment: Unifying Structure and Texture Similarity](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.07728/) (2020)
- [Residual Dense Network for Image Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.08797/) (2018)
- [Deep Multi-scale Convolutional Neural Network for Dynamic Scene Deblurring](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.02177/) (2016)
- [Designing a Practical Degradation Model for Deep Blind Image Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.14006/) (2021)
- [Meta-Learning with Latent Embedding Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.05960/) (2018)
- [Toward Real-World Single Image Super-Resolution: A New Benchmark and A New Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.00523/) (2019)
- [Accelerating the Super-Resolution Convolutional Neural Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.00367/) (2016)
- [Rethinking ImageNet Pre-training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.08883/) (2018)
- [DeblurGAN-v2: Deblurring (Orders-of-Magnitude) Faster and Better](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.03826/) (2019)
- [Scale-recurrent Network for Deep Image Deblurring](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.01770/) (2018)
- [Density-aware Single Image De-raining using a Multi-stream Dense Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.07412/) (2018)
- [Component Divide-and-Conquer for Real-World Image Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.01928/) (2020)
- [Spatial Attentive Single-Image Deraining with a High Quality Real Rain Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.01538/) (2019)
- [Meta-Baseline: Exploring Simple Meta-Learning for Few-Shot Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.04390/) (2020)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [NTIRE 2025 Challenge on Short-form UGC Video Quality Assessment and Enhancement: Methods and Results](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.13131/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Collecting amounts of distorted/clean image pairs in the real world is non-trivial, which seriously limits the practical applications of these supervised learning-based methods on real-world image super-resolution (RealSR). Previous works usually address this problem by leveraging unsupervised learning-based technologies to alleviate the dependency on paired training samples. However, these methods typically suffer from unsatisfactory texture synthesis due to the lack of supervision of clean images. To overcome this problem, we are the first to have a close look at the under-explored direction for RealSR, i.e., few-shot real-world image super-resolution, which aims to tackle the challenging RealSR problem with few-shot distorted/clean image pairs. Under this brand-new scenario, we propose Distortion Relation guided Transfer Learning (DRTL) for the few-shot RealSR by transferring the rich restoration knowledge from auxiliary distortions (i.e., synthetic distortions) to the target RealSR under the guidance of distortion relation. Concretely, DRTL builds a knowledge graph to capture the distortion relation between auxiliary distortions and target distortion (i.e., real distortions in RealSR). Based on the distortion relation, DRTL adopts a gradient reweighting strategy to guide the knowledge transfer process between auxiliary distortions and target distortions. In this way, DRTL could quickly learn the most relevant knowledge from the synthetic distortions for the target distortion. We instantiate DRTL with two commonly-used transfer learning paradigms, including pre-training and meta-learning pipelines, to realize a distortion relation-aware Few-shot RealSR. Extensive experiments on multiple benchmarks and thorough ablation studies demonstrate the effectiveness of our DRTL.