# Enriched CNN-Transformer Feature Aggregation Networks for Super-Resolution

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2203.07682 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.07682/

## Key facts

- Cited by 22 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 50 of its 76 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 15 Mar 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 50)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [Swin Transformer: Hierarchical Vision Transformer using Shifted Windows](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.14030/) (2021)
- [End-to-End Object Detection with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.12872/) (2020)
- [Layer Normalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1607.06450/) (2016)
- [Training data-efficient image transformers & distillation through attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.12877/) (2020)
- [Gaussian Error Linear Units (GELUs)](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.08415/) (2016)
- [Deformable DETR: Deformable Transformers for End-to-End Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.04159/) (2020)
- [Pyramid Vision Transformer: A Versatile Backbone for Dense Prediction without Convolutions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.12122/) (2021)
- [Photo-Realistic Single Image Super-Resolution Using a Generative Adversarial Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1609.04802/) (2016)
- [SwinIR: Image Restoration Using Swin Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.10257/) (2021)
- [SlowFast Networks for Video Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.03982/) (2018)
- [Vision Transformers for Dense Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.13413/) (2021)
- [Enhanced Deep Residual Networks for Single Image Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1707.02921/) (2017)
- [Linformer: Self-Attention with Linear Complexity](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.04768/) (2020)
- [Image Super-Resolution Using Very Deep Residual Channel Attention Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.02758/) (2018)
- [ESRGAN: Enhanced Super-Resolution Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.00219/) (2018)
- [Image Super-Resolution Using Deep Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1501.00092/) (2014)
- [Real-Time Single Image and Video Super-Resolution Using an Efficient Sub-Pixel Convolutional Neural Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1609.05158/) (2016)
- [Tokens-to-Token ViT: Training Vision Transformers from Scratch on ImageNet](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.11986/) (2021)
- [Two-Stream Convolutional Networks for Action Recognition in Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1406.2199/) (2014)
- [CvT: Introducing Convolutions to Vision Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.15808/) (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)
- [DynamicViT: Efficient Vision Transformers with Dynamic Token Sparsification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.02034/) (2021)
- [CrossViT: Cross-Attention Multi-Scale Vision Transformer for Image Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.14899/) (2021)
- [ConViT: Improving Vision Transformers with Soft Convolutional Inductive Biases](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.10697/) (2021)

## Built on by (most cited first, 22 of 22)

- [Progressive Focused Transformer for Single Image Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.20337/) (2025)
- [GTP-ViT: Efficient Vision Transformers via Graph-based Token Propagation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.03035/) (2023)
- [MambaCSR: Dual-Interleaved Scanning for Compressed Image Super-Resolution With SSMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.11758/) (2024)
- [CFAT: Unleashing TriangularWindows for Image Super-resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.16143/) (2024)
- [Emulating Self-attention with Convolution for Efficient Image Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.06671/) (2025)
- [CTA-Net: A CNN-Transformer Aggregation Network for Improving Multi-Scale Feature Extraction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.11428/) (2024)
- [HMANet: Hybrid Multi-Axis Aggregation Network for Image Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.05001/) (2024)
- [SR-CACO-2: A Dataset for Confocal Fluorescence Microscopy Image Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.09168/) (2024)
- [Wavelet-Assisted Mamba for Satellite-Derived Sea Surface Temperature Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.24334/) (2025)
- [MoCoLSK: Modality Conditioned High-Resolution Downscaling for Land Surface Temperature](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.19835/) (2024)
- [VORTEX: Challenging CNNs at Texture Recognition by using Vision Transformers with Orderless and Randomized Token Encodings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.06368/) (2025)
- [TGBFormer: Transformer-GraphFormer Blender Network for Video Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.13903/) (2025)
- [Structural Similarity-Inspired Unfolding for Lightweight Image Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.11823/) (2025)
- [ECG-Soup: Harnessing Multi-Layer Synergy for ECG Foundation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.00102/) (2025)
- [Flexible Alignment Super-Resolution Network for Multi-Contrast MRI](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.03460/) (2022)
- [MTDA-HSED: Mutual-Assistance Tuning and Dual-Branch Aggregating for Heterogeneous Sound Event Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.06196/) (2024)
- [Lightweight single-image super-resolution network based on dual paths](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.06590/) (2024)
- [Efficient Feature Aggregation and Scale-Aware Regression for Monocular 3D Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.02747/) (2024)
- [HDW-SR: High-Frequency Guided Diffusion Model based on Wavelet Decomposition for Image Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.13175/) (2025)
- [H-CNN-ViT: A Hierarchical Gated Attention Multi-Branch Model for Bladder Cancer Recurrence Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.13869/) (2025)
- [HIMOSA: Efficient Remote Sensing Image Super-Resolution with Hierarchical Mixture of Sparse Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.00275/) (2025)
- [Dual-Branch State-Displacement Network for Sea Surface Temperature Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.15423/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Recent transformer-based super-resolution (SR) methods have achieved promising results against conventional CNN-based methods. However, these approaches suffer from essential shortsightedness created by only utilizing the standard self-attention-based reasoning. In this paper, we introduce an effective hybrid SR network to aggregate enriched features, including local features from CNNs and long-range multi-scale dependencies captured by transformers. Specifically, our network comprises transformer and convolutional branches, which synergetically complement each representation during the restoration procedure. Furthermore, we propose a cross-scale token attention module, allowing the transformer branch to exploit the informative relationships among tokens across different scales efficiently. Our proposed method achieves state-of-the-art SR results on numerous benchmark datasets.