# DiT4SR: Taming Diffusion Transformer for Real-World Image Super-Resolution

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.23580 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.23580/

## Key facts

- Cited by 53 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 60 of its 79 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 30 Mar 2025.

## 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 60)

- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [High-Resolution Image Synthesis with Latent Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.10752/) (2021)
- [Exploring the Limits of Transfer Learning with a Unified Text-to-Text Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.10683/) (2019)
- [The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Deep Features as a Perceptual Metric](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.03924/) (2018)
- [Visual Instruction Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.08485/) (2023)
- [Photorealistic Text-to-Image Diffusion Models with Deep Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.11487/) (2022)
- [Scalable Diffusion Models with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.09748/) (2022)
- [A Style-Based Generator Architecture for Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.04948/) (2018)
- [Adding Conditional Control to Text-to-Image Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.05543/) (2023)
- [SDXL: Improving Latent Diffusion Models for High-Resolution Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.01952/) (2023)
- [Scaling Rectified Flow Transformers for High-Resolution Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.03206/) (2024)
- [SwinIR: Image Restoration Using Swin Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.10257/) (2021)
- [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)
- [ESRGAN: Enhanced Super-Resolution Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.00219/) (2018)
- [Reproducible scaling laws for contrastive language-image learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.07143/) (2022)
- [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)
- [Pre-Trained Image Processing Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.00364/) (2020)
- [Residual Dense Network for Image Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.08797/) (2018)
- [The Perception-Distortion Tradeoff](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.06077/) (2017)
- [Designing a Practical Degradation Model for Deep Blind Image Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.14006/) (2021)
- [MANIQA: Multi-dimension Attention Network for No-Reference Image Quality Assessment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.08958/) (2022)
- [Exploiting Diffusion Prior for Real-World Image Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.07015/) (2023)
- [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)
- [ResShift: Efficient Diffusion Model for Image Super-resolution by Residual Shifting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.12348/) (2023)
- [SANA: Efficient High-Resolution Image Synthesis with Linear Diffusion Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.10629/) (2024)
- [SeeSR: Towards Semantics-Aware Real-World Image Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.16518/) (2023)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 53)

- [Lumina-OmniLV: A Unified Multimodal Framework for General Low-Level Vision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.04903/) (2025)
- [One-Step Diffusion Transformer for Controllable Real-World Image Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.17138/) (2025)
- [Time-Aware One Step Diffusion Network for Real-World Image Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.16557/) (2025)
- [Hallucination Score: Towards Mitigating Hallucinations in Generative Image Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.14367/) (2025)
- [Improved Adversarial Diffusion Compression for Real-World Video Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.00458/) (2026)
- [VOSR: A Vision-Only Generative Model for Image Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.03225/) (2026)
- [GDPO-SR: Group Direct Preference Optimization for One-Step Generative Image Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.16769/) (2026)
- [Restore Text First, Enhance Image Later: Two-Stage Scene Text Image Super-Resolution with Glyph Structure Guidance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.21590/) (2025)
- [TreeQ: Pushing the Quantization Boundary of Diffusion Transformer via Tree-Structured Mixed-Precision Search](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.06353/) (2025)
- [Unified Diffusion Transformer for High-fidelity Text-Aware Image Restoration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.08922/) (2025)
- [Bridging Fidelity-Reality with Controllable One-Step Diffusion for Image Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.14061/) (2025)
- [FinPercep-RM: A Fine-grained Reward Model and Co-evolutionary Curriculum for RL-based Real-world Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.22647/) (2025)
- [Joint Geometric and Trajectory Consistency Learning for One-Step Real-World Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.24240/) (2026)
- [Low-Resolution Editing is All You Need for High-Resolution Editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.19945/) (2025)
- [FRAMER: Frequency-Aligned Self-Distillation with Adaptive Modulation Leveraging Diffusion Priors for Real-World Image Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.01390/) (2025)
- [Task-Oriented Data Synthesis and Control-Rectify Sampling for Remote Sensing Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.16740/) (2025)
- [Spectral and Trajectory Regularization for Diffusion Transformer Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.06275/) (2026)
- [MFSR: MeanFlow Distillation for One Step Real-World Image Super Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.20690/) (2026)
- [YOSE: You Only Select Essential Tokens for Efficient DiT-based Video Object Removal](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.27322/) (2026)
- [OP4KSR: One-Step Patch-Free 4K Super-Resolution with Periodic Artifact Suppression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.13457/) (2026)
- [STCDiT: Spatio-Temporally Consistent Diffusion Transformer for High-Quality Video Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.18786/) (2025)
- [Bird-SR: Bidirectional Reward-Guided Diffusion for Real-World Image Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.07069/) (2026)
- [LucidNFT: LR-Anchored Multi-Reward Preference Optimization for Flow-Based Real-World Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.05947/) (2026)
- [TIDE: Text-Informed Dynamic Extrapolation with Step-Aware Temperature Control for Diffusion Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.08928/) (2026)
- [InstanceRSR: Real-World Super-Resolution via Instance-Aware Representation Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.24240/) (2026)
- [Bridging Restoration and Generation in One-step Diffusion for Real-World Image Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.24136/) (2026)
- [Noise-Started One-Step Real-World Super-Resolution via LR-Conditioned SplitMeanFlow and GAN Refinement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.09328/) (2026)
- [PRISM: Prior Rectification and Uncertainty-Aware Structure Modeling for Diffusion-Based Text Image Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.13027/) (2026)
- [DreamSR: Towards Ultra-High-Resolution Image Super-Resolution via a Receptive-Field Enhanced Diffusion Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.15682/) (2026)
- [Coloring the Noise: Adversarial Sobolev Alignment for Faithful Image Super Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.23264/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Large-scale pre-trained diffusion models are becoming increasingly popular in solving the Real-World Image Super-Resolution (Real-ISR) problem because of their rich generative priors. The recent development of diffusion transformer (DiT) has witnessed overwhelming performance over the traditional UNet-based architecture in image generation, which also raises the question: Can we adopt the advanced DiT-based diffusion model for Real-ISR? To this end, we propose our DiT4SR, one of the pioneering works to tame the large-scale DiT model for Real-ISR. Instead of directly injecting embeddings extracted from low-resolution (LR) images like ControlNet, we integrate the LR embeddings into the original attention mechanism of DiT, allowing for the bidirectional flow of information between the LR latent and the generated latent. The sufficient interaction of these two streams allows the LR stream to evolve with the diffusion process, producing progressively refined guidance that better aligns with the generated latent at each diffusion step. Additionally, the LR guidance is injected into the generated latent via a cross-stream convolution layer, compensating for DiT's limited ability to capture local information. These simple but effective designs endow the DiT model with superior performance in Real-ISR, which is demonstrated by extensive experiments. Project Page: https://adam-duan.github.io/projects/dit4sr/.