# Implicit Neural Representation-Based Continuous Single Image Super-Resolution: An Empirical Benchmark

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.17723 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.17723/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 39 of its 59 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 25 Jan 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 39)

- [The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Deep Features as a Perceptual Metric](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.03924/) (2018)
- [SGDR: Stochastic Gradient Descent with Warm Restarts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.03983/) (2016)
- [Progressive Growing of GANs for Improved Quality, Stability, and Variation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.10196/) (2017)
- [Perceptual Losses for Real-Time Style Transfer and Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1603.08155/) (2016)
- [Occupancy Networks: Learning 3D Reconstruction in Function Space](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.03828/) (2018)
- [Enhanced Deep Residual Networks for Single Image Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1707.02921/) (2017)
- [Image Super-Resolution via Iterative Refinement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.07636/) (2021)
- [Beyond a Gaussian Denoiser: Residual Learning of Deep CNN for Image Denoising](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.03981/) (2016)
- [Real-Time Single Image and Video Super-Resolution Using an Efficient Sub-Pixel Convolutional Neural Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1609.05158/) (2016)
- [Reproducible scaling laws for contrastive language-image learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.07143/) (2022)
- [Learning Implicit Fields for Generative Shape Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.02822/) (2018)
- [Accurate Image Super-Resolution Using Very Deep Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1511.04587/) (2015)
- [Residual Dense Network for Image Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.08797/) (2018)
- [Learning Continuous Image Representation with Local Implicit Image Function](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.09161/) (2020)
- [A Neural Algorithm of Artistic Style](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1508.06576/) (2015)
- [SRDiff: Single Image Super-Resolution with Diffusion Probabilistic Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.14951/) (2021)
- [Learning Deep CNN Denoiser Prior for Image Restoration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.03264/) (2017)
- [Accelerating the Super-Resolution Convolutional Neural Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.00367/) (2016)
- [SAL: Sign Agnostic Learning of Shapes from Raw Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.10414/) (2019)
- [Deep Learning for Image Super-resolution: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.06068/) (2019)
- [MambaIR: A Simple Baseline for Image Restoration with State-Space Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.15648/) (2024)
- [Single Image Super-Resolution via a Holistic Attention Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.08767/) (2020)
- [Learning Shape Templates with Structured Implicit Functions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.06447/) (2019)
- [Gradient Magnitude Similarity Deviation: A Highly Efficient Perceptual Image Quality Index](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1308.3052/) (2013)
- [Meta-SR: A Magnification-Arbitrary Network for Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.00875/) (2019)
- [Local Texture Estimator for Implicit Representation Function](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.08918/) (2021)
- [VmambaIR: Visual State Space Model for Image Restoration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.11423/) (2024)
- [CiaoSR: Continuous Implicit Attention-in-Attention Network for Arbitrary-Scale Image Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.04362/) (2022)
- [Rethinking Data Augmentation for Image Super-resolution: A Comprehensive Analysis and a New Strategy](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.00448/) (2020)
- [Hypernetwork functional image representation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.10404/) (2019)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Implicit neural representation (INR) has become the standard approach for arbitrary-scale image super-resolution (ASSR). However, no systematic empirical study has examined the effectiveness of existing methods under consistent conditions, nor investigated the effects of different training recipes, such as objective design, optimization strategies, and scaling behavior. A rigorous empirical analysis is essential not only for benchmarking performance and revealing true gains but also for establishing the current state of ASSR, identifying saturation limits, and highlighting promising directions. We fill this gap by training 6 INR-based ASSR methods under 9 controlled training recipes and evaluating them across 7 datasets and 7 image quality assessment (IQA) metrics, presenting aggregated performance results through a unified ranking framework that enables more reliable interpretation of performance comparisons and evaluation claims. Furthermore, we investigate the impact of carefully controlled training configurations on perceptual image quality and analyze the role of auxiliary objectives in preserving edges, textures, and fine details during training. Our analysis yields the following insights, previously overlooked: (1) Recent, more complex INR methods provide only marginal improvements over earlier methods, indicating architectural saturation on existing benchmarks. (2) Model performance is strongly correlated with training configurations, a factor neglected in prior comparisons. (3) Auxiliary objectives consistently enhance texture fidelity across architectures compared to standard L1-Loss, emphasizing the role of objective design for targeted perceptual gains. (4) INR-based ASSR exhibits consistent, monotonic scaling behavior across model capacity, training compute, and data diversity, though with diminishing returns as complexity grows.