# RealViformer: Investigating Attention for Real-World Video Super-Resolution

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2407.13987 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.13987/

## Key facts

- Cited by 33 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 34 of its 43 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 19 Jul 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 34)

- [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)
- [Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.00667/) (2022)
- [Squeeze-and-Excitation Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1709.01507/) (2017)
- [Perceptual Losses for Real-Time Style Transfer and Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1603.08155/) (2016)
- [SwinIR: Image Restoration Using Swin Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.10257/) (2021)
- [Restormer: Efficient Transformer for High-Resolution Image Restoration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.09881/) (2021)
- [Image Super-Resolution Using Very Deep Residual Channel Attention Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.02758/) (2018)
- [VICReg: Variance-Invariance-Covariance Regularization for Self-Supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.04906/) (2021)
- [Real-ESRGAN: Training Real-World Blind Super-Resolution with Pure Synthetic Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.10833/) (2021)
- [Pre-Trained Image Processing Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.00364/) (2020)
- [Designing a Practical Degradation Model for Deep Blind Image Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.14006/) (2021)
- [EDVR: Video Restoration with Enhanced Deformable Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.02716/) (2019)
- [Activating More Pixels in Image Super-Resolution Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.04437/) (2022)
- [Optical Flow Estimation using a Spatial Pyramid Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.00850/) (2016)
- [BasicVSR++: Improving Video Super-Resolution with Enhanced Propagation and Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.13371/) (2021)
- [BasicVSR: The Search for Essential Components in Video Super-Resolution and Beyond](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.02181/) (2020)
- [VRT: A Video Restoration Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.12288/) (2022)
- [Recurrent Video Restoration Transformer with Guided Deformable Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.02146/) (2022)
- [On Feature Decorrelation in Self-Supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.00470/) (2021)
- [Learning a No-Reference Quality Metric for Single-Image Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.05890/) (2016)
- [Fast and Accurate Image Super-Resolution with Deep Laplacian Pyramid Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.01992/) (2017)
- [Investigating Tradeoffs in Real-World Video Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.12704/) (2021)
- [Unfolding the Alternating Optimization for Blind Super Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.02631/) (2020)
- [Video Super-Resolution Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.06847/) (2021)
- [Video Super-Resolution with Recurrent Structure-Detail Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.00455/) (2020)
- [Reducing Overfitting in Deep Networks by Decorrelating Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1511.06068/) (2015)
- [Rethinking Alignment in Video Super-Resolution Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.08494/) (2022)
- [Efficient Video Super-Resolution through Recurrent Latent Space Propagation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.08080/) (2019)
- [Omni Aggregation Networks for Lightweight Image Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.10244/) (2023)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 33)

- [SeedVR: Seeding Infinity in Diffusion Transformer Towards Generic Video Restoration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.01320/) (2025)
- [STAR: Spatial-Temporal Augmentation with Text-to-Video Models for Real-World Video Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.02976/) (2025)
- [SeedVR2: One-Step Video Restoration via Diffusion Adversarial Post-Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.05301/) (2025)
- [FlashVSR: Towards Real-Time Diffusion-Based Streaming Video Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.12747/) (2025)
- [DOVE: Efficient One-Step Diffusion Model for Real-World Video Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.16239/) (2025)
- [UltraGen: High-Resolution Video Generation with Hierarchical Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.18775/) (2025)
- [InfVSR: Toward Consistency-Driven Streaming Generative Video Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.00948/) (2025)
- [Stream-DiffVSR: Low-Latency Streamable Video Super-Resolution via Auto-Regressive Diffusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.23709/) (2025)
- [Self-supervised ControlNet with Spatio-Temporal Mamba for Real-world Video Super-resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.01037/) (2025)
- [LiftVSR: Lifting Image Diffusion to Video Super-Resolution via Hybrid Temporal Modeling with Only 4×RTX 4090s](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.08529/) (2025)
- [SimpleGVR: A Simple Baseline for Latent-Cascaded Video Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.19838/) (2025)
- [Blind Video Super-Resolution based on Implicit Kernels](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.07856/) (2025)
- [DUO-VSR: Dual-Stream Distillation for One-Step Video Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.22271/) (2026)
- [OS-DiffVSR: Towards One-step Latent Diffusion Model for High-detailed Real-world Video Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.16507/) (2025)
- [TurboVSR: Fantastic Video Upscalers and Where to Find Them](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.23618/) (2025)
- [Towards Redundancy Reduction in Diffusion Models for Efficient Video Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.23980/) (2025)
- [CreativeVR: Diffusion-Prior-Guided Approach for Structure and Motion Restoration in Generative and Real Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.12060/) (2025)
- [SwiftVR: Real-Time One-Step Generative Video Restoration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.09516/) (2026)
- [ICME 2025 Grand Challenge on Video Super-Resolution for Video Conferencing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.12269/) (2025)
- [Trajectory-aware Shifted State Space Models for Online Video Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.10453/) (2025)
- [STCDiT: Spatio-Temporally Consistent Diffusion Transformer for High-Quality Video Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.18786/) (2025)
- [Taming Real-World Space-Time Video Super-Resolution with One-Step Diffusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.20308/) (2026)
- [Oneta: Multi-Style Image Enhancement Using Eigentransformation Functions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.23547/) (2025)
- [Physics Encoded Spatial and Temporal Generative Adversarial Network for Tropical Cyclone Image Super-resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.17277/) (2026)
- [Compressed-Domain-Aware Online Video Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.07694/) (2026)
- [TextOVSR: Text-Guided Real-World Opera Video Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.15153/) (2026)
- [DTG-Restore: Training-Free Diffusion Refinement for Generative Video Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.30431/) (2026)
- [Binarized High-Efficiency RAW Video Restoration and Beyond](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.16756/) (2026)
- [ClearText-Video: A Large-Scale Text-Centric Video Dataset Bridging Video Restoration and Scene-Text Enhancement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.28784/) (2026)
- [High Dynamic Range Video Reconstruction from Single-Exposure Raw Sequences](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.27274/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

In real-world video super-resolution (VSR), videos suffer from in-the-wild degradations and artifacts. VSR methods, especially recurrent ones, tend to propagate artifacts over time in the real-world setting and are more vulnerable than image super-resolution. This paper investigates the influence of artifacts on commonly used covariance-based attention mechanisms in VSR. Comparing the widely-used spatial attention, which computes covariance over space, versus the channel attention, we observe that the latter is less sensitive to artifacts. However, channel attention leads to feature redundancy, as evidenced by the higher covariance among output channels. As such, we explore simple techniques such as the squeeze-excite mechanism and covariance-based rescaling to counter the effects of high channel covariance. Based on our findings, we propose RealViformer. This channel-attention-based real-world VSR framework surpasses state-of-the-art on two real-world VSR datasets with fewer parameters and faster runtimes. The source code is available at https://github.com/Yuehan717/RealViformer.