# Versatile Recompression-Aware Perceptual Image Super-Resolution

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.18090 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.18090/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 32 of its 42 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 22 Nov 2025.

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

- [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)
- [Score-Based Generative Modeling through Stochastic Differential Equations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.13456/) (2020)
- [Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.00667/) (2022)
- [Adding Conditional Control to Text-to-Image Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.05543/) (2023)
- [Categorical Reparameterization with Gumbel-Softmax](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.01144/) (2016)
- [Estimating or Propagating Gradients Through Stochastic Neurons for Conditional Computation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1308.3432/) (2013)
- [Arbitrary Style Transfer in Real-time with Adaptive Instance Normalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.06868/) (2017)
- [Image Super-Resolution via Iterative Refinement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.07636/) (2021)
- [The Concrete Distribution: A Continuous Relaxation of Discrete Random Variables](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.00712/) (2016)
- [Real-ESRGAN: Training Real-World Blind Super-Resolution with Pure Synthetic Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.10833/) (2021)
- [Variational image compression with a scale hyperprior](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.01436/) (2018)
- [Image Quality Assessment: Unifying Structure and Texture Similarity](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.07728/) (2020)
- [Adversarial Diffusion Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.17042/) (2023)
- [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)
- [Exploiting Diffusion Prior for Real-World Image Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.07015/) (2023)
- [SRDiff: Single Image Super-Resolution with Diffusion Probabilistic Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.14951/) (2021)
- [ResShift: Efficient Diffusion Model for Image Super-resolution by Residual Shifting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.12348/) (2023)
- [SeeSR: Towards Semantics-Aware Real-World Image Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.16518/) (2023)
- [SinSR: Diffusion-Based Image Super-Resolution in a Single Step](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.14760/) (2023)
- [Invertible Image Signal Processing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.15061/) (2021)
- [Degradation-Guided One-Step Image Super-Resolution with Diffusion Priors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.17058/) (2024)
- [DenseNet: Implementing Efficient ConvNet Descriptor Pyramids](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1404.1869/) (2014)
- [Self-Conditioned Probabilistic Learning of Video Rescaling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.11639/) (2021)
- [Preprocessing Enhanced Image Compression for Machine Vision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.05650/) (2022)
- [Differentiable JPEG: The Devil is in the Details](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.06978/) (2023)
- [Self-Asymmetric Invertible Network for Compression-Aware Image Rescaling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.02353/) (2023)
- [Sandwiched Compression: Repurposing Standard Codecs with Neural Network Wrappers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.05887/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Perceptual image super-resolution (SR) methods restore degraded images and produce sharp outputs. In practice, those outputs are usually recompressed for storage and transmission. Ignoring recompression is suboptimal as the downstream codec might add additional artifacts to restored images. However, jointly optimizing SR and recompression is challenging, as the codecs are not differentiable and vary in configuration. In this paper, we present Versatile Recompression-Aware Perceptual Super-Resolution (VRPSR), which makes existing perceptual SR aware of versatile compression. First, we formulate compression as conditional text-to-image generation and utilize a pre-trained diffusion model to build a generalizable codec simulator. Next, we propose a set of training techniques tailored for perceptual SR, including optimizing the simulator using perceptual targets and adopting slightly compressed images as the training target. Empirically, our VRPSR achieves 10% - 40% bitrate savings based on Real-ESRGAN and S3Diff under H.264/H.265/H.266 single-picture (intra) compression. Besides, our VRPSR facilitates joint optimization of SR and the post-processing model after recompression.