# Exploring Real-Time Super-Resolution: Benchmarking and Fine-Tuning for Streaming Content

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.11339 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.11339/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 36 of its 58 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 11 Feb 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 36)

- [GPT-4 Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.08774/) (2023)
- [Very Deep Convolutional Networks for Large-Scale Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.1556/) (2014)
- [The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Deep Features as a Perceptual Metric](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.03924/) (2018)
- [Image-to-Image Translation with Conditional Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.07004/) (2016)
- [Sigmoid Loss for Language Image Pre-Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.15343/) (2023)
- [The Kinetics Human Action Video Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.06950/) (2017)
- [SwinIR: Image Restoration Using Swin Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.10257/) (2021)
- [ESRGAN: Enhanced Super-Resolution Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.00219/) (2018)
- [MUSIQ: Multi-scale Image Quality Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.05997/) (2021)
- [Fast and Accurate Deep Network Learning by Exponential Linear Units (ELUs)](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1511.07289/) (2015)
- [Exploring CLIP for Assessing the Look and Feel of Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.12396/) (2022)
- [Real-ESRGAN: Training Real-World Blind Super-Resolution with Pure Synthetic Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.10833/) (2021)
- [Video Enhancement with Task-Oriented Flow](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.09078/) (2017)
- [Toward Real-World Single Image Super-Resolution: A New Benchmark and A New Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.00523/) (2019)
- [YouTube-VOS: A Large-Scale Video Object Segmentation Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.03327/) (2018)
- [BasicVSR++: Improving Video Super-Resolution with Enhanced Propagation and Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.13371/) (2021)
- [YouTube-8M: A Large-Scale Video Classification Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1609.08675/) (2016)
- [MERLOT: Multimodal Neural Script Knowledge Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.02636/) (2021)
- [A Short Note on the Kinetics-700 Human Action Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.06987/) (2019)
- [YouTube UGC Dataset for Video Compression Research](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.06457/) (2019)
- [YouTube-BoundingBoxes: A Large High-Precision Human-Annotated Data Set for Object Detection in Video](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1702.00824/) (2017)
- [Unified Quality Assessment of In-the-Wild Videos with Mixed Datasets Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.04263/) (2020)
- [Spatially-Adaptive Feature Modulation for Efficient Image Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.13800/) (2023)
- [The Ninth NTIRE 2024 Efficient Super-Resolution Challenge Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.10343/) (2024)
- [Residual Local Feature Network for Efficient Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.07514/) (2022)
- [HiT-SR: Hierarchical Transformer for Efficient Image Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.05878/) (2024)
- [Extremely Lightweight Quantization Robust Real-Time Single-Image Super Resolution for Mobile Devices](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.10288/) (2021)
- [COMISR: Compression-Informed Video Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.01237/) (2021)
- [The Tenth NTIRE 2025 Efficient Super-Resolution Challenge Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.10686/) (2025)
- [Learning Spatiotemporal Frequency-Transformer for Compressed Video Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.03012/) (2022)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Recent advancements in real-time super-resolution have enabled higher-quality video streaming, yet existing methods struggle with the unique challenges of compressed video content. Commonly used datasets do not accurately reflect the characteristics of streaming media, limiting the relevance of current benchmarks. To address this gap, we introduce a comprehensive dataset - StreamSR - sourced from YouTube, covering a wide range of video genres and resolutions representative of real-world streaming scenarios. We benchmark 11 state-of-the-art real-time super-resolution models to evaluate their performance for the streaming use-case. Furthermore, we propose EfRLFN, an efficient real-time model that integrates Efficient Channel Attention and a hyperbolic tangent activation function - a novel design choice in the context of real-time super-resolution. We extensively optimized the architecture to maximize efficiency and designed a composite loss function that improves training convergence. EfRLFN combines the strengths of existing architectures while improving both visual quality and runtime performance. Finally, we show that fine-tuning other models on our dataset results in significant performance gains that generalize well across various standard benchmarks. We made the dataset, the code, and the benchmark available at https://github.com/EvgeneyBogatyrev/EfRLFN.