# SSL: A Self-similarity Loss for Improving Generative Image Super-resolution

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2408.05713 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.05713/

## Key facts

- Cited by 5 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 47 of its 78 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 11 Aug 2024.

## 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 47)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.11239/) (2020)
- [Very Deep Convolutional Networks for Large-Scale Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.1556/) (2014)
- [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)
- [A Style-Based Generator Architecture for Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.04948/) (2018)
- [Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.00667/) (2022)
- [LAION-5B: An open large-scale dataset for training next generation image-text models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.08402/) (2022)
- [Photo-Realistic Single Image Super-Resolution Using a Generative Adversarial Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1609.04802/) (2016)
- [Enhanced Deep Residual Networks for Single Image Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1707.02921/) (2017)
- [Image Super-Resolution via Iterative Refinement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.07636/) (2021)
- [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)
- [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)
- [Accurate Image Super-Resolution Using Very Deep Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1511.04587/) (2015)
- [Image Quality Assessment: Unifying Structure and Texture Similarity](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.07728/) (2020)
- [Designing a Practical Degradation Model for Deep Blind Image Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.14006/) (2021)
- [Activating More Pixels in Image Super-Resolution Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.04437/) (2022)
- [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)
- [Recovering Realistic Texture in Image Super-resolution by Deep Spatial Feature Transform](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.02815/) (2018)
- [ResShift: Efficient Diffusion Model for Image Super-resolution by Residual Shifting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.12348/) (2023)
- [Sketch-based Manga Retrieval using Manga109 Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1510.04389/) (2015)
- [Single Image Super-Resolution via a Holistic Attention Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.08767/) (2020)
- [DiffBIR: Towards Blind Image Restoration with Generative Diffusion Prior](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.15070/) (2023)
- [DiffIR: Efficient Diffusion Model for Image Restoration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.09472/) (2023)
- [Deep Unfolding Network for Image Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.10428/) (2020)

## Built on by (most cited first, 5 of 5)

- [Toward Generalized Image Quality Assessment: Relaxing the Perfect Reference Quality Assumption](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.11221/) (2025)
- [Generalized and Efficient 2D Gaussian Splatting for Arbitrary-scale Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.06838/) (2025)
- [Exploring Semantic Feature Discrimination for Perceptual Image Super-Resolution and Opinion-Unaware No-Reference Image Quality Assessment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.19295/) (2025)
- [Adaptive Densification for High-Fidelity and Efficient Sparse Gaussian Splatting in Arbitrary-Scale Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.29400/) (2026)
- [Resonant Brane Splatting for Arbitrary-Scale Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.29453/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Generative adversarial networks (GAN) and generative diffusion models (DM) have been widely used in real-world image super-resolution (Real-ISR) to enhance the image perceptual quality. However, these generative models are prone to generating visual artifacts and false image structures, resulting in unnatural Real-ISR results. Based on the fact that natural images exhibit high self-similarities, i.e., a local patch can have many similar patches to it in the whole image, in this work we propose a simple yet effective self-similarity loss (SSL) to improve the performance of generative Real-ISR models, enhancing the hallucination of structural and textural details while reducing the unpleasant visual artifacts. Specifically, we compute a self-similarity graph (SSG) of the ground-truth image, and enforce the SSG of Real-ISR output to be close to it. To reduce the training cost and focus on edge areas, we generate an edge mask from the ground-truth image, and compute the SSG only on the masked pixels. The proposed SSL serves as a general plug-and-play penalty, which could be easily applied to the off-the-shelf Real-ISR models. Our experiments demonstrate that, by coupling with SSL, the performance of many state-of-the-art Real-ISR models, including those GAN and DM based ones, can be largely improved, reproducing more perceptually realistic image details and eliminating many false reconstructions and visual artifacts. Codes and supplementary material can be found at https://github.com/ChrisDud0257/SSL