# LKFMixer: Exploring Large Kernel Feature For Efficient Image Super-Resolution

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.11391 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.11391/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 32 of its 45 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 15 Aug 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 32)

- [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)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Deep Features as a Perceptual Metric](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.03924/) (2018)
- [A ConvNet for the 2020s](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.03545/) (2022)
- [Xception: Deep Learning with Depthwise Separable Convolutions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1610.02357/) (2016)
- [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)
- [ESRGAN: Enhanced Super-Resolution Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.00219/) (2018)
- [Real-Time Single Image and Video Super-Resolution Using an Efficient Sub-Pixel Convolutional Neural Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1609.05158/) (2016)
- [MambaIR: A Simple Baseline for Image Restoration with State-Space Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.15648/) (2024)
- [Sketch-based Manga Retrieval using Manga109 Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1510.04389/) (2015)
- [Lightweight Image Super-Resolution with Information Multi-distillation Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.11856/) (2019)
- [Visual Attention Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.09741/) (2022)
- [Efficient Long-Range Attention Network for Image Super-resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.06697/) (2022)
- [Interpreting Super-Resolution Networks with Local Attribution Maps](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.11036/) (2020)
- [Run, Don't Walk: Chasing Higher FLOPS for Faster Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.03667/) (2023)
- [Residual Feature Distillation Network for Lightweight Image Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.11551/) (2020)
- [Efficient Image Super-Resolution Using Pixel Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.01073/) (2020)
- [Spatially-Adaptive Feature Modulation for Efficient Image Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.13800/) (2023)
- [The Ninth NTIRE 2024 Efficient Super-Resolution Challenge Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.10343/) (2024)
- [ShuffleMixer: An Efficient ConvNet for Image Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.15175/) (2022)
- [Blueprint Separable Residual Network for Efficient Image Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.05996/) (2022)
- [CAMixerSR: Only Details Need More "Attention"](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.19289/) (2024)
- [Multi-scale Attention Network for Single Image Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.14145/) (2022)
- [Rethinking Depthwise Separable Convolutions: How Intra-Kernel Correlations Lead to Improved MobileNets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.13549/) (2020)
- [PeLK: Parameter-efficient Large Kernel ConvNets with Peripheral Convolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.07589/) (2024)
- [See More Details: Efficient Image Super-Resolution by Experts Mining](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.03412/) (2024)
- [Efficient Image Super-Resolution using Vast-Receptive-Field Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.05960/) (2022)
- [Transforming Image Super-Resolution: A ConvFormer-based Efficient Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.05633/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

The success of self-attention (SA) in Transformer demonstrates the importance of non-local information to image super-resolution (SR), but the huge computing power required makes it difficult to implement lightweight models. To solve this problem, we propose a pure convolutional neural network (CNN) model, LKFMixer, which utilizes large convolutional kernel to simulate the ability of self-attention to capture non-local features. Specifically, we increase the kernel size to 31 to obtain the larger receptive field as possible, and reduce the parameters and computations by coordinate decomposition. Meanwhile, a spatial feature modulation block (SFMB) is designed to enhance the focus of feature information on both spatial and channel dimension. In addition, by introducing feature selection block (FSB), the model can adaptively adjust the weights between local features and non-local features. Extensive experiments show that the proposed LKFMixer family outperform other state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods in terms of SR performance and reconstruction quality. In particular, compared with SwinIR-light on Manga109 dataset, LKFMixer-L achieves 0.6dB PSNR improvement at ×4 scale, while the inference speed is ×5 times faster. The code is available at https://github.com/Supereeeee/LKFMixer.