# Rethinking Diffusion Model-Based Video Super-Resolution: Leveraging Dense Guidance from Aligned Features

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.16928 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.16928/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 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 37 of its 62 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 21 Nov 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 37)

- [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)
- [The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Deep Features as a Perceptual Metric](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.03924/) (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)
- [Stable Video Diffusion: Scaling Latent Video Diffusion Models to Large Datasets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.15127/) (2023)
- [RAFT: Recurrent All-Pairs Field Transforms for Optical Flow](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.12039/) (2020)
- [Image Super-Resolution via Iterative Refinement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.07636/) (2021)
- [Deformable Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.06211/) (2017)
- [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)
- [Image Quality Assessment: Unifying Structure and Texture Similarity](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.07728/) (2020)
- [Video Enhancement with Task-Oriented Flow](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.09078/) (2017)
- [EDVR: Video Restoration with Enhanced Deformable Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.02716/) (2019)
- [Scaling up GANs for Text-to-Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.05511/) (2023)
- [Exploiting Diffusion Prior for Real-World Image Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.07015/) (2023)
- [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)
- [BasicVSR: The Search for Essential Components in Video Super-Resolution and Beyond](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.02181/) (2020)
- [One-Step Effective Diffusion Network for Real-World Image Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.08177/) (2024)
- [TDAN: Temporally Deformable Alignment Network for Video Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.02898/) (2018)
- [VRT: A Video Restoration Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.12288/) (2022)
- [Recurrent Video Restoration Transformer with Guided Deformable Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.02146/) (2022)
- [Investigating Tradeoffs in Real-World Video Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.12704/) (2021)
- [Video Super-Resolution Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.06847/) (2021)
- [Frequency Separation for Real-World Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.07850/) (2019)
- [Arbitrary-steps Image Super-resolution via Diffusion Inversion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.09013/) (2024)
- [Rethinking Alignment in Video Super-Resolution Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.08494/) (2022)
- [Efficient Video Super-Resolution through Recurrent Latent Space Propagation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.08080/) (2019)

## Built on by (most cited first, 2 of 2)

- [NTIRE 2026 Challenge on Short-form UGC Video Restoration in the Wild with Generative Models: Datasets, Methods and Results](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.10551/) (2026)
- [AVSR-Diff: Scale-Agnostic Diffusion Priors for Temporally Consistent Arbitrary-Scale Video Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.00987/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Diffusion model (DM) based Video Super-Resolution (VSR) approaches achieve impressive perceptual quality. However, they suffer from error accumulation, spatial artifacts, and a trade-off between perceptual quality and fidelity, primarily caused by inaccurate alignment and insufficient compensation between video frames. In this paper, within the DM-based VSR pipeline, we revisit the role of alignment and compensation between adjacent video frames and reveal two crucial observations: (a) the feature domain is better suited than the pixel domain for information compensation due to its stronger spatial and temporal correlations, and (b) warping at an upscaled resolution better preserves high-frequency information, but this benefit is not necessarily monotonic. Therefore, we propose a novel Densely Guided diffusion model with Aligned Features for Video Super-Resolution (DGAF-VSR), with an Optical Guided Warping Module (OGWM) to maintain high-frequency details in the aligned features and a Feature-wise Temporal Condition Module (FTCM) to deliver dense guidance in the feature domain. Extensive experiments on synthetic and real-world datasets demonstrate that DGAF-VSR surpasses state-of-the-art methods in key aspects of VSR, including perceptual quality (35.82% DISTS reduction), fidelity (0.20 dB PSNR gain), and temporal consistency (30.37% tLPIPS reduction).