# ZipIR: Latent Pyramid Diffusion Transformer for High-Resolution Image Restoration

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.08591 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.08591/

## 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 52 of its 60 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 11 Apr 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 52)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.11239/) (2020)
- [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)
- [Denoising Diffusion Implicit Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.02502/) (2020)
- [Scalable Diffusion Models with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.09748/) (2022)
- [Intriguing properties of neural networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1312.6199/) (2013)
- [SDXL: Improving Latent Diffusion Models for High-Resolution Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.01952/) (2023)
- [Improved Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.09672/) (2021)
- [Taming Transformers for High-Resolution Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.09841/) (2020)
- [InternVL: Scaling up Vision Foundation Models and Aligning for Generic Visual-Linguistic Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.14238/) (2023)
- [Non-local Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.07971/) (2017)
- [SwinIR: Image Restoration Using Swin Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.10257/) (2021)
- [Consistency Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.01469/) (2023)
- [DeepFool: a simple and accurate method to fool deep neural networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1511.04599/) (2015)
- [Demystifying MMD GANs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.01401/) (2018)
- [Image Super-Resolution Using Deep Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1501.00092/) (2014)
- [Cascaded Diffusion Models for High Fidelity Image Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.15282/) (2021)
- [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)
- [Resolution-robust Large Mask Inpainting with Fourier Convolutions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.07161/) (2021)
- [Improved Distribution Matching Distillation for Fast Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.14867/) (2024)
- [Latte: Latent Diffusion Transformer for Video Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.03048/) (2024)
- [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)

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

- [PixelDiT: Pixel Diffusion Transformers for Image Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.20645/) (2025)
- [MMIG-Bench: Towards Comprehensive and Explainable Evaluation of Multi-Modal Image Generation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.19415/) (2025)
- [DuSPiT: Dual-Branch Sub-Patch Pixel Diffusion Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.18510/) (2026)
- [LPM: Industrial-Scale Generative Video Restoration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.13460/) (2026)
- [PixelDiT2: Representation-Grounded Pixel Diffusion Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.24919/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Recent progress in generative models has significantly improved image restoration capabilities, particularly through powerful diffusion models that offer remarkable recovery of semantic details and local fidelity. However, deploying these models at ultra-high resolutions faces a critical trade-off between quality and efficiency due to the computational demands of long-range attention mechanisms. To address this, we introduce ZipIR, a novel framework that enhances efficiency, scalability, and long-range modeling for high-res image restoration. ZipIR employs a highly compressed latent representation that compresses image 32x, effectively reducing the number of spatial tokens, and enabling the use of high-capacity models like the Diffusion Transformer (DiT). Toward this goal, we propose a Latent Pyramid VAE (LP-VAE) design that structures the latent space into sub-bands to ease diffusion training. Trained on full images up to 2K resolution, ZipIR surpasses existing diffusion-based methods, offering unmatched speed and quality in restoring high-resolution images from severely degraded inputs.