# ResShift: Efficient Diffusion Model for Image Super-resolution by Residual Shifting

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2307.12348 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.12348/

## Key facts

- Cited by 365 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Inverse problems and image restoration, one of 14 directions in Diffusion models.
- Builds on 59 of its 70 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 23 Jul 2023.

## Placed in

- Diffusion models / [Inverse problems and image restoration](https://mlsanity.com/diffusion/inverse-problems-and-image-restoration/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 59)

- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.11239/) (2020)
- [PyTorch: An Imperative Style, High-Performance Deep Learning Library](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.01703/) (2019)
- [High-Resolution Image Synthesis with Latent Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.10752/) (2021)
- [Swin Transformer: Hierarchical Vision Transformer using Shifted Windows](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.14030/) (2021)
- [The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Deep Features as a Perceptual Metric](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.03924/) (2018)
- [Denoising Diffusion Implicit Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.02502/) (2020)
- [Score-Based Generative Modeling through Stochastic Differential Equations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.13456/) (2020)
- [Diffusion Models Beat GANs on Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.05233/) (2021)
- [Deep Unsupervised Learning using Nonequilibrium Thermodynamics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1503.03585/) (2015)
- [Generative Modeling by Estimating Gradients of the Data Distribution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.05600/) (2019)
- [Improved Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.09672/) (2021)
- [Taming Transformers for High-Resolution Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.09841/) (2020)
- [DPM-Solver: A Fast ODE Solver for Diffusion Probabilistic Model Sampling in Around 10 Steps](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.00927/) (2022)
- [SDEdit: Guided Image Synthesis and Editing with Stochastic Differential Equations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.01073/) (2021)
- [SwinIR: Image Restoration Using Swin Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.10257/) (2021)
- [LAION-400M: Open Dataset of CLIP-Filtered 400 Million Image-Text Pairs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.02114/) (2021)
- [Image Super-Resolution via Iterative Refinement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.07636/) (2021)
- [RePaint: Inpainting using Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.09865/) (2022)
- [Beyond a Gaussian Denoiser: Residual Learning of Deep CNN for Image Denoising](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.03981/) (2016)
- [Palette: Image-to-Image Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.05826/) (2021)
- [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)
- [MUSIQ: Multi-scale Image Quality Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.05997/) (2021)
- [Exploring CLIP for Assessing the Look and Feel of Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.12396/) (2022)
- [Real-ESRGAN: Training Real-World Blind Super-Resolution with Pure Synthetic Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.10833/) (2021)
- [Denoising Diffusion Restoration Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.11793/) (2022)
- [Blended Diffusion for Text-driven Editing of Natural Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.14818/) (2021)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 365)

- [SeeSR: Towards Semantics-Aware Real-World Image Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.16518/) (2023)
- [Pixel-Aware Stable Diffusion for Realistic Image Super-resolution and Personalized Stylization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.14469/) (2023)
- [One-Step Effective Diffusion Network for Real-World Image Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.08177/) (2024)
- [SinSR: Diffusion-Based Image Super-Resolution in a Single Step](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.14760/) (2023)
- [Upscale-A-Video: Temporal-Consistent Diffusion Model for Real-World Video Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.06640/) (2023)
- [Go-with-the-Flow: Motion-Controllable Video Diffusion Models Using Real-Time Warped Noise](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.08331/) (2025)
- [Diffusion Models for Image Restoration and Enhancement: A Comprehensive Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.09388/) (2023)
- [Pixel-level and Semantic-level Adjustable Super-resolution: A Dual-LoRA Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.03017/) (2024)
- [TSD-SR: One-Step Diffusion with Target Score Distillation for Real-World Image Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.18263/) (2024)
- [Arbitrary-steps Image Super-resolution via Diffusion Inversion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.09013/) (2024)
- [Diffusion Models in Low-Level Vision: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.11138/) (2024)
- [Residual Denoising Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.13712/) (2023)
- [Degradation-Guided One-Step Image Super-Resolution with Diffusion Priors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.17058/) (2024)
- [AddSR: Accelerating Diffusion-based Blind Super-Resolution with Adversarial Diffusion Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.01717/) (2024)
- [DreamClear: High-Capacity Real-World Image Restoration with Privacy-Safe Dataset Curation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.18666/) (2024)
- [Diffusion Models, Image Super-Resolution And Everything: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.00736/) (2024)
- [Efficient Diffusion Model for Image Restoration by Residual Shifting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.07319/) (2024)
- [ZONE: Zero-Shot Instruction-Guided Local Editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.16794/) (2023)
- [SeedVR: Seeding Infinity in Diffusion Transformer Towards Generic Video Restoration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.01320/) (2025)
- [A Survey on All-in-One Image Restoration: Taxonomy, Evaluation and Future Trends](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.15067/) (2024)
- [STAR: Spatial-Temporal Augmentation with Text-to-Video Models for Real-World Video Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.02976/) (2025)
- [DiT4SR: Taming Diffusion Transformer for Real-World Image Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.23580/) (2025)
- [Adversarial Diffusion Compression for Real-World Image Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.13383/) (2024)
- [SeedVR2: One-Step Video Restoration via Diffusion Adversarial Post-Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.05301/) (2025)
- [Boosting Latent Diffusion with Flow Matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.07360/) (2023)
- [One Diffusion Step to Real-World Super-Resolution via Flow Trajectory Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.01993/) (2025)
- [Efficient Real-world Image Super-Resolution Via Adaptive Directional Gradient Convolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.07023/) (2024)
- [Harnessing Diffusion-Yielded Score Priors for Image Restoration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.20590/) (2025)
- [Efficient Diffusion Models: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.06805/) (2025)
- [DiffIR2VR-Zero: Zero-Shot Video Restoration with Diffusion-based Image Restoration Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.01519/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Diffusion-based image super-resolution (SR) methods are mainly limited by the low inference speed due to the requirements of hundreds or even thousands of sampling steps. Existing acceleration sampling techniques inevitably sacrifice performance to some extent, leading to over-blurry SR results. To address this issue, we propose a novel and efficient diffusion model for SR that significantly reduces the number of diffusion steps, thereby eliminating the need for post-acceleration during inference and its associated performance deterioration. Our method constructs a Markov chain that transfers between the high-resolution image and the low-resolution image by shifting the residual between them, substantially improving the transition efficiency. Additionally, an elaborate noise schedule is developed to flexibly control the shifting speed and the noise strength during the diffusion process. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed method obtains superior or at least comparable performance to current state-of-the-art methods on both synthetic and real-world datasets, even only with 15 sampling steps. Our code and model are available at https://github.com/zsyOAOA/ResShift.