# Data Upcycling Knowledge Distillation for Image Super-Resolution

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2309.14162 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.14162/

## Key facts

- Cited by 4 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in General knowledge distillation methods, one of 12 directions in Knowledge distillation.
- Builds on 55 of its 85 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 25 Sep 2023.

## Placed in

- Knowledge distillation / [General knowledge distillation methods](https://mlsanity.com/distill/general-knowledge-distillation-methods/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 55)

- [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)
- [PyTorch: An Imperative Style, High-Performance Deep Learning Library](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.01703/) (2019)
- [Distilling the Knowledge in a Neural Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1503.02531/) (2015)
- [Explaining and Harnessing Adversarial Examples](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6572/) (2014)
- [DistilBERT, a distilled version of BERT: smaller, faster, cheaper and lighter](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.01108/) (2019)
- [Searching for MobileNetV3](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.02244/) (2019)
- [SwinIR: Image Restoration Using Swin Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.10257/) (2021)
- [FitNets: Hints for Thin Deep Nets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6550/) (2014)
- [Restormer: Efficient Transformer for High-Resolution Image Restoration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.09881/) (2021)
- [Knowledge Distillation: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.05525/) (2020)
- [Enhanced Deep Residual Networks for Single Image Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1707.02921/) (2017)
- [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)
- [TinyBERT: Distilling BERT for Natural Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.10351/) (2019)
- [Paying More Attention to Attention: Improving the Performance of Convolutional Neural Networks via Attention Transfer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.03928/) (2016)
- [Temporal Ensembling for Semi-Supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1610.02242/) (2016)
- [Virtual Adversarial Training: A Regularization Method for Supervised and Semi-Supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.03976/) (2017)
- [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)
- [Relational Knowledge Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.05068/) (2019)
- [Uformer: A General U-Shaped Transformer for Image Restoration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.03106/) (2021)
- [BinaryConnect: Training Deep Neural Networks with binary weights during propagations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1511.00363/) (2015)
- [Designing a Practical Degradation Model for Deep Blind Image Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.14006/) (2021)
- [Similarity-Preserving Knowledge Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.09682/) (2019)
- [Be Your Own Teacher: Improve the Performance of Convolutional Neural Networks via Self Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.08094/) (2019)
- [FBNet: Hardware-Aware Efficient ConvNet Design via Differentiable Neural Architecture Search](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.03443/) (2018)
- [Single Path One-Shot Neural Architecture Search with Uniform Sampling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.00420/) (2019)
- [Toward Real-World Single Image Super-Resolution: A New Benchmark and A New Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.00523/) (2019)
- [Decoupled Knowledge Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.08679/) (2022)

## Built on by (most cited first, 4 of 4)

- [MTKD: Multi-Teacher Knowledge Distillation for Image Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.09571/) (2024)
- [U-Know-DiffPAN: An Uncertainty-aware Knowledge Distillation Diffusion Framework with Details Enhancement for PAN-Sharpening](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.06243/) (2024)
- [Knowledge Distillation with Multi-granularity Mixture of Priors for Image Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.02573/) (2024)
- [Outlier-Aware Post-Training Quantization for Image Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.00682/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Knowledge distillation (KD) compresses deep neural networks by transferring task-related knowledge from cumbersome pre-trained teacher models to compact student models. However, current KD methods for super-resolution (SR) networks overlook the nature of SR task that the outputs of the teacher model are noisy approximations to the ground-truth distribution of high-quality images (GT), which shades the teacher model's knowledge to result in limited KD effects. To utilize the teacher model beyond the GT upper-bound, we present the Data Upcycling Knowledge Distillation (DUKD), to transfer the teacher model's knowledge to the student model through the upcycled in-domain data derived from training data. Besides, we impose label consistency regularization to KD for SR by the paired invertible augmentations to improve the student model's performance and robustness. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate that the DUKD method significantly outperforms previous arts on several SR tasks.