# MegaSR: Mining Customized Semantics and Expressive Guidance for Real-World Image Super-Resolution

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.08096 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.08096/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 58 of its 72 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 11 Mar 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 58)

- [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)
- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [U-Net: Convolutional Networks for Biomedical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.04597/) (2015)
- [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)
- [LoRA: Low-Rank Adaptation of Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.09685/) (2021)
- [The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Deep Features as a Perceptual Metric](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.03924/) (2018)
- [ImageNet Large Scale Visual Recognition Challenge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.0575/) (2014)
- [Scalable Diffusion Models with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.09748/) (2022)
- [Qwen2.5-VL Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.13923/) (2025)
- [Adding Conditional Control to Text-to-Image Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.05543/) (2023)
- [BLIP: Bootstrapping Language-Image Pre-training for Unified Vision-Language Understanding and Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.12086/) (2022)
- [Improved Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.09672/) (2021)
- [Perceptual Losses for Real-Time Style Transfer and Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1603.08155/) (2016)
- [Masked-attention Mask Transformer for Universal Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.01527/) (2021)
- [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)
- [Spectral Normalization for Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.05957/) (2018)
- [Depth Anything V2](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.09414/) (2024)
- [Semantic Image Synthesis with Spatially-Adaptive Normalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.07291/) (2019)
- [Image Super-Resolution Using Very Deep Residual Channel Attention Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.02758/) (2018)
- [Swin Transformer V2: Scaling Up Capacity and Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.09883/) (2021)
- [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)
- [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)
- [Pre-Trained Image Processing Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.00364/) (2020)
- [ZoeDepth: Zero-shot Transfer by Combining Relative and Metric Depth](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.12288/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Text-to-image (T2I) models have ushered in a new era of real-world image super-resolution (Real-ISR) due to their rich internal implicit knowledge for multimodal learning. Although bringing high-level semantic priors and dense pixel guidance have led to advances in reconstruction, we identified several critical phenomena by analyzing the behavior of existing T2I-based Real-ISR methods: (1) Fine detail deficiency, which ultimately leads to incorrect reconstruction in local regions. (2) Block-wise semantic inconsistency, which results in distracted semantic interpretations across U-Net blocks. (3) Edge ambiguity, which causes noticeable structural degradation. Building upon these observations, we first introduce MegaSR, which enhances the T2I-based Real-ISR models with fine-grained customized semantics and expressive guidance to unlock semantically rich and structurally consistent reconstruction. Then, we propose the Customized Semantics Module (CSM) to supplement fine-grained semantics from the image modality and regulate the semantic fusion between multi-level knowledge to realize customization for different U-Net blocks. Besides the semantic adaptation, we identify expressive multimodal signals through pair-wise comparisons and introduce the Multimodal Signal Fusion Module (MSFM) to aggregate them for structurally consistent reconstruction. Extensive experiments on real-world and synthetic datasets demonstrate the superiority of the method. Notably, it not only achieves state-of-the-art performance on quality-driven metrics but also remains competitive on fidelity-focused metrics, striking a balance between perceptual realism and faithful content reconstruction.