# From Local Windows to Adaptive Candidates via Individualized Exploratory: Rethinking Attention for Image Super-Resolution

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.08341 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.08341/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 30 of its 49 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 13 Jan 2026.

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

- [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)
- [Non-local Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.07971/) (2017)
- [Pyramid Vision Transformer: A Versatile Backbone for Dense Prediction without Convolutions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.12122/) (2021)
- [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)
- [Image Super-Resolution Using Very Deep Residual Channel Attention Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.02758/) (2018)
- [Image Super-Resolution Using Deep Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1501.00092/) (2014)
- [Accurate Image Super-Resolution Using Very Deep Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1511.04587/) (2015)
- [Uformer: A General U-Shaped Transformer for Image Restoration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.03106/) (2021)
- [Residual Dense Network for Image Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.08797/) (2018)
- [Twins: Revisiting the Design of Spatial Attention in Vision Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.13840/) (2021)
- [CSWin Transformer: A General Vision Transformer Backbone with Cross-Shaped Windows](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.00652/) (2021)
- [Activating More Pixels in Image Super-Resolution Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.04437/) (2022)
- [Sketch-based Manga Retrieval using Manga109 Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1510.04389/) (2015)
- [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)
- [Fast, Accurate, and Lightweight Super-Resolution with Cascading Residual Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.08664/) (2018)
- [Lightweight Image Super-Resolution with Information Multi-distillation Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.11856/) (2019)
- [Efficient Long-Range Attention Network for Image Super-resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.06697/) (2022)
- [MambaIRv2: Attentive State Space Restoration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.15269/) (2024)
- [Cross Aggregation Transformer for Image Restoration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.13654/) (2022)
- [LAPAR: Linearly-Assembled Pixel-Adaptive Regression Network for Single Image Super-Resolution and Beyond](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.10422/) (2021)
- [Accurate Image Restoration with Attention Retractable Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.01427/) (2022)
- [Transcending the Limit of Local Window: Advanced Super-Resolution Transformer with Adaptive Token Dictionary](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.08209/) (2024)
- [Omni Aggregation Networks for Lightweight Image Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.10244/) (2023)
- [N-Gram in Swin Transformers for Efficient Lightweight Image Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.11436/) (2022)
- [Progressive Focused Transformer for Single Image Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.20337/) (2025)
- [CATANet: Efficient Content-Aware Token Aggregation for Lightweight Image Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.06896/) (2025)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [Rank-Factorized Implicit Neural Bias: Scaling Super-Resolution Transformer with FlashAttention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.06738/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Single Image Super-Resolution (SISR) is a fundamental computer vision task that aims to reconstruct a high-resolution (HR) image from a low-resolution (LR) input. Transformer-based methods have achieved remarkable performance by modeling long-range dependencies in degraded images. However, their feature-intensive attention computation incurs high computational cost. To improve efficiency, most existing approaches partition images into fixed groups and restrict attention within each group. Such group-wise attention overlooks the inherent asymmetry in token similarities, thereby failing to enable flexible and token-adaptive attention computation. To address this limitation, we propose the Individualized Exploratory Transformer (IET), which introduces a novel Individualized Exploratory Attention (IEA) mechanism that allows each token to adaptively select its own content-aware and independent attention candidates. This token-adaptive and asymmetric design enables more precise information aggregation while maintaining computational efficiency. Extensive experiments on standard SR benchmarks demonstrate that IET achieves state-of-the-art performance under comparable computational complexity.