# UltraVSR: Achieving Ultra-Realistic Video Super-Resolution with Efficient One-Step Diffusion Space

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.19958 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.19958/

## Key facts

- Cited by 14 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 34 of its 59 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 26 May 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 34)

- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [LoRA: Low-Rank Adaptation of Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.09685/) (2021)
- [Diffusion Models Beat GANs on Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.05233/) (2021)
- [Deep Unsupervised Learning using Nonequilibrium Thermodynamics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1503.03585/) (2015)
- [DreamFusion: Text-to-3D using 2D Diffusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.14988/) (2022)
- [CogVideoX: Text-to-Video Diffusion Models with An Expert Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.06072/) (2024)
- [ProlificDreamer: High-Fidelity and Diverse Text-to-3D Generation with Variational Score Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.16213/) (2023)
- [Imagic: Text-Based Real Image Editing with Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.09276/) (2022)
- [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)
- [The Perception-Distortion Tradeoff](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.06077/) (2017)
- [Paint by Example: Exemplar-based Image Editing with Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.13227/) (2022)
- [Emergent Correspondence from Image Diffusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.03881/) (2023)
- [One Step Diffusion via Shortcut Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.12557/) (2024)
- [ResShift: Efficient Diffusion Model for Image Super-resolution by Residual Shifting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.12348/) (2023)
- [BasicVSR++: Improving Video Super-Resolution with Enhanced Propagation and Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.13371/) (2021)
- [Exploring Video Quality Assessment on User Generated Contents from Aesthetic and Technical Perspectives](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.04894/) (2022)
- [BasicVSR: The Search for Essential Components in Video Super-Resolution and Beyond](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.02181/) (2020)
- [Scaling Up to Excellence: Practicing Model Scaling for Photo-Realistic Image Restoration In the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.13627/) (2024)
- [One-Step Effective Diffusion Network for Real-World Image Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.08177/) (2024)
- [SinSR: Diffusion-Based Image Super-Resolution in a Single Step](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.14760/) (2023)
- [Motion-I2V: Consistent and Controllable Image-to-Video Generation with Explicit Motion Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.15977/) (2024)
- [ProPainter: Improving Propagation and Transformer for Video Inpainting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.03897/) (2023)
- [PIPAL: a Large-Scale Image Quality Assessment Dataset for Perceptual Image Restoration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.12142/) (2020)
- [Recurrent Video Restoration Transformer with Guided Deformable Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.02146/) (2022)
- [Detail-revealing Deep Video Super-resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.02738/) (2017)
- [Cross-Image Attention for Zero-Shot Appearance Transfer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.03335/) (2023)
- [SwiftBrush: One-Step Text-to-Image Diffusion Model with Variational Score Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.05239/) (2023)
- [Efficient Video Super-Resolution through Recurrent Latent Space Propagation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.08080/) (2019)
- [A Simple Baseline for Video Restoration with Grouped Spatial-temporal Shift](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.10810/) (2022)

## Built on by (most cited first, 14 of 14)

- [Single-step Diffusion-based Video Coding with Semantic-Temporal Guidance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.07480/) (2025)
- [InfVSR: Toward Consistency-Driven Streaming Generative Video Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.00948/) (2025)
- [Stream-DiffVSR: Low-Latency Streamable Video Super-Resolution via Auto-Regressive Diffusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.23709/) (2025)
- [Improved Adversarial Diffusion Compression for Real-World Video Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.00458/) (2026)
- [DUO-VSR: Dual-Stream Distillation for One-Step Video Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.22271/) (2026)
- [Towards Redundancy Reduction in Diffusion Models for Efficient Video Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.23980/) (2025)
- [LVTINO: LAtent Video consisTency INverse sOlver for High Definition Video Restoration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.01339/) (2025)
- [Trajectory-aware Shifted State Space Models for Online Video Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.10453/) (2025)
- [Taming Real-World Space-Time Video Super-Resolution with One-Step Diffusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.20308/) (2026)
- [TRaM-VSR: Importance-Aware Token Routing and Merging for One-Step Diffusion Video Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.22231/) (2026)
- [LiteVSR: Lightweight Adaptation of Frozen Diffusion Transformers for Video Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.09250/) (2026)
- [AnchorSplat: Fast and Structure Consistent Detail Synthesis for Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.01290/) (2026)
- [LoCoVSR: Local Context Diffusion Posterior Sampling for Video Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.32742/) (2026)
- [SoL-Refiner: Speed-of-Light One-Step Refinement for High-Resolution Video](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.37969/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Diffusion models have shown great potential in generating realistic image detail. However, adapting these models to video super-resolution (VSR) remains challenging due to their inherent stochasticity and lack of temporal modeling. Previous methods have attempted to mitigate this issue by incorporating motion information and temporal layers. However, unreliable motion estimation from low-resolution videos and costly multiple sampling steps with deep temporal layers limit them to short sequences. In this paper, we propose UltraVSR, a novel framework that enables ultra-realistic and temporally-coherent VSR through an efficient one-step diffusion space. A central component of UltraVSR is the Degradation-aware Reconstruction Scheduling (DRS), which estimates a degradation factor from the low-resolution input and transforms the iterative denoising process into a single-step reconstruction from low-resolution to high-resolution videos. To ensure temporal consistency, we propose a lightweight Recurrent Temporal Shift (RTS) module, including an RTS-convolution unit and an RTS-attention unit. By partially shifting feature components along the temporal dimension, it enables effective propagation, fusion, and alignment across frames without explicit temporal layers. The RTS module is integrated into a pretrained text-to-image diffusion model and is further enhanced through Spatio-temporal Joint Distillation (SJD), which improves temporally coherence while preserving realistic details. Additionally, we introduce a Temporally Asynchronous Inference (TAI) strategy to capture long-range temporal dependencies under limited memory constraints. Extensive experiments show that UltraVSR achieves state-of-the-art performance, both qualitatively and quantitatively, in a single sampling step. Code is available at https://github.com/yongliuy/UltraVSR.