# MGHF: Multi-Granular High-Frequency Perceptual Loss for Image Super-Resolution

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2411.13548 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.13548/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 76 of its 100 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 20 Nov 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 76)

- [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)
- [High-Resolution Image Synthesis with Latent Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.10752/) (2021)
- [Very Deep Convolutional Networks for Large-Scale Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.1556/) (2014)
- [The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Deep Features as a Perceptual Metric](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.03924/) (2018)
- [Diffusion Models Beat GANs on Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.05233/) (2021)
- [A Style-Based Generator Architecture for Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.04948/) (2018)
- [Taming Transformers for High-Resolution Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.09841/) (2020)
- [Perceptual Losses for Real-Time Style Transfer and Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1603.08155/) (2016)
- [Sinkhorn Distances: Lightspeed Computation of Optimal Transportation Distances](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1306.0895/) (2013)
- [Variational Inference with Normalizing Flows](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.05770/) (2015)
- [Density estimation using Real NVP](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1605.08803/) (2016)
- [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)
- [Glow: Generative Flow with Invertible 1x1 Convolutions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.03039/) (2018)
- [Image Super-Resolution via Iterative Refinement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.07636/) (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)
- [MUSIQ: Multi-scale Image Quality Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.05997/) (2021)
- [NICE: Non-linear Independent Components Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1410.8516/) (2014)
- [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)
- [Deep Learning and the Information Bottleneck Principle](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1503.02406/) (2015)
- [Contrastive Learning for Unpaired Image-to-Image Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.15651/) (2020)
- [Contrastive Learning with Hard Negative Samples](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.04592/) (2020)
- [The Perception-Distortion Tradeoff](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.06077/) (2017)
- [Error bounds for approximations with deep ReLU networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1610.01145/) (2016)

## Built on by (most cited first, 2 of 2)

- [SeedVR2: One-Step Video Restoration via Diffusion Adversarial Post-Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.05301/) (2025)
- [Devil is in the Details: Density Guidance for Detail-Aware Generation with Flow Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.05807/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

While different variants of perceptual losses have been employed in super-resolution literature to synthesize more realistic, appealing, and detailed high-resolution images, most are convolutional neural networks-based, causing information loss during guidance and often relying on complicated architectures and training procedures. We propose an invertible neural network (INN)-based naive Multi-Granular High-Frequency (MGHF-n) perceptual loss trained on ImageNet to overcome these issues. Furthermore, we develop a comprehensive framework (MGHF-c) with several constraints to preserve, prioritize, and regularize information across multiple perspectives: texture and style preservation, content preservation, regional detail preservation, and joint content-style regularization. Information is prioritized through adaptive entropy-based pruning and reweighting of INN features. We utilize Gram matrix loss for style preservation and mean-squared error loss for content preservation. Additionally, we propose content-style consistency through correlation loss to regulate unnecessary texture generation while preserving content information. Since small image regions may contain intricate details, we employ modulated PatchNCE in the INN features as a local information preservation objective. Extensive experiments on various super-resolution algorithms, including GAN- and diffusion-based methods, demonstrate that our MGHF framework significantly improves performance. After the review process, our code will be released in the public repository.