# HIMOSA: Efficient Remote Sensing Image Super-Resolution with Hierarchical Mixture of Sparse Attention

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.00275 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.00275/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 45 of its 53 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 29 Nov 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 45)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [Swin Transformer: Hierarchical Vision Transformer using Shifted Windows](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.14030/) (2021)
- [Outrageously Large Neural Networks: The Sparsely-Gated Mixture-of-Experts Layer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1701.06538/) (2017)
- [Switch Transformers: Scaling to Trillion Parameter Models with Simple and Efficient Sparsity](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.03961/) (2021)
- [Photo-Realistic Single Image Super-Resolution Using a Generative Adversarial Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1609.04802/) (2016)
- [SwinIR: Image Restoration Using Swin Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.10257/) (2021)
- [GShard: Scaling Giant Models with Conditional Computation and Automatic Sharding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.16668/) (2020)
- [Restormer: Efficient Transformer for High-Resolution Image Restoration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.09881/) (2021)
- [Enhanced Deep Residual Networks for Single Image Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1707.02921/) (2017)
- [GQA: Training Generalized Multi-Query Transformer Models from Multi-Head Checkpoints](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.13245/) (2023)
- [Image Super-Resolution Using Very Deep Residual Channel Attention Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.02758/) (2018)
- [ESRGAN: Enhanced Super-Resolution Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.00219/) (2018)
- [Image Super-Resolution Using Deep Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1501.00092/) (2014)
- [Real-Time Single Image and Video Super-Resolution Using an Efficient Sub-Pixel Convolutional Neural Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1609.05158/) (2016)
- [Accurate Image Super-Resolution Using Very Deep Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1511.04587/) (2015)
- [Pre-Trained Image Processing Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.00364/) (2020)
- [Residual Dense Network for Image Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.08797/) (2018)
- [Remote Sensing Image Scene Classification: Benchmark and State of the Art](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.00121/) (2017)
- [DOTA: A Large-scale Dataset for Object Detection in Aerial Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.10398/) (2017)
- [Mixture-of-Experts with Expert Choice Routing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.09368/) (2022)
- [Activating More Pixels in Image Super-Resolution Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.04437/) (2022)
- [Muon is Scalable for LLM Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.16982/) (2025)
- [AID: A Benchmark Dataset for Performance Evaluation of Aerial Scene Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.05167/) (2016)
- [Object Detection in Optical Remote Sensing Images: A Survey and A New Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.00133/) (2019)
- [Deeply-Recursive Convolutional Network for Image Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1511.04491/) (2015)
- [Single Image Super-Resolution via a Holistic Attention Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.08767/) (2020)
- [Learning A Sparse Transformer Network for Effective Image Deraining](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.11950/) (2023)
- [Interpreting Super-Resolution Networks with Local Attribution Maps](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.11036/) (2020)
- [Cross Aggregation Transformer for Image Restoration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.13654/) (2022)

## Abstract (arXiv)

In remote sensing applications, such as disaster detection and response, real-time efficiency and model lightweighting are of critical importance. Consequently, existing remote sensing image super-resolution methods often face a trade-off between model performance and computational efficiency. In this paper, we propose a lightweight super-resolution framework for remote sensing imagery, named HIMOSA. Specifically, HIMOSA leverages the inherent redundancy in remote sensing imagery and introduces a content-aware sparse attention mechanism, enabling the model to achieve fast inference while maintaining strong reconstruction performance. Furthermore, to effectively leverage the multi-scale repetitive patterns found in remote sensing imagery, we introduce a hierarchical window expansion and reduce the computational complexity by adjusting the sparsity of the attention. Extensive experiments on multiple remote sensing datasets demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance while maintaining computational efficiency.