# Improved Adversarial Diffusion Compression for Real-World Video Super-Resolution

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.00458 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.00458/

## Key facts

- Cited by 5 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Inverse problems and image restoration, one of 14 directions in Diffusion models.
- Builds on 73 of its 87 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 28 Feb 2026.

## Placed in

- Diffusion models / [Inverse problems and image restoration](https://mlsanity.com/diffusion/inverse-problems-and-image-restoration/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 73)

- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [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)
- [Flow Matching for Generative Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.02747/) (2022)
- [Adding Conditional Control to Text-to-Image Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.05543/) (2023)
- [Scaling Rectified Flow Transformers for High-Resolution Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.03206/) (2024)
- [A ConvNet for the 2020s](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.03545/) (2022)
- [Wan: Open and Advanced Large-Scale Video Generative Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.20314/) (2025)
- [CogVideoX: Text-to-Video Diffusion Models with An Expert Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.06072/) (2024)
- [ProlificDreamer: High-Fidelity and Diverse Text-to-3D Generation with Variational Score Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.16213/) (2023)
- [MUSIQ: Multi-scale Image Quality Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.05997/) (2021)
- [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)
- [Latent Consistency Models: Synthesizing High-Resolution Images with Few-Step Inference](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.04378/) (2023)
- [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)
- [Improved Distribution Matching Distillation for Fast Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.14867/) (2024)
- [Zero-Shot Image Restoration Using Denoising Diffusion Null-Space Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.00490/) (2022)
- [Designing a Practical Degradation Model for Deep Blind Image Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.14006/) (2021)
- [MANIQA: Multi-dimension Attention Network for No-Reference Image Quality Assessment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.08958/) (2022)
- [EDVR: Video Restoration with Enhanced Deformable Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.02716/) (2019)
- [ResShift: Efficient Diffusion Model for Image Super-resolution by Residual Shifting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.12348/) (2023)
- [BasicVSR++: Improving Video Super-Resolution with Enhanced Propagation and Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.13371/) (2021)
- [OpenVid-1M: A Large-Scale High-Quality Dataset for Text-to-video Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.02371/) (2024)
- [Exploring Video Quality Assessment on User Generated Contents from Aesthetic and Technical Perspectives](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.04894/) (2022)
- [BasicVSR: The Search for Essential Components in Video Super-Resolution and Beyond](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.02181/) (2020)
- [Fast High-Resolution Image Synthesis with Latent Adversarial Diffusion Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.12015/) (2024)
- [SDXL-Lightning: Progressive Adversarial Diffusion Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.13929/) (2024)
- [Learning Blind Video Temporal Consistency](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.00449/) (2018)
- [One-Step Effective Diffusion Network for Real-World Image Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.08177/) (2024)

## Built on by (most cited first, 5 of 5)

- [OctoT2I: A Self-Evolving Agentic Text-to-Image Router](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.01803/) (2026)
- [OARS: Process-Aware Online Alignment for Generative Real-World Image Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.12811/) (2026)
- [VQ-Jarvis: Retrieval-Augmented Video Restoration Agent with Sharp Vision and Fast Thought](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.22998/) (2026)
- [ReCaVSR: One-Step Streaming Diffusion Video Super-Resolution with Recycled Latents and Learned Cache Routing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.37831/) (2026)
- [High-Throughput Generative Video Super-Resolution on a Single Consumer GPU](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.13179/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

While many diffusion models have achieved impressive results in real-world video super-resolution (Real-VSR) by generating rich and realistic details, their reliance on multi-step sampling leads to slow inference. One-step networks like SeedVR2, DOVE, and DLoRAL alleviate this through condensing generation into one single step, yet they remain heavy, with billions of parameters and multi-second latency. Recent adversarial diffusion compression (ADC) offers a promising path via pruning and distilling these models into a compact AdcSR network, but directly applying it to Real-VSR fails to balance spatial details and temporal consistency due to its lack of temporal awareness and the limitations of standard adversarial learning. To address these challenges, we propose an improved ADC method for Real-VSR. Our approach distills a large diffusion Transformer (DiT) teacher DOVE equipped with 3D spatio-temporal attentions, into a pruned 2D Stable Diffusion (SD)-based AdcSR backbone, augmented with lightweight 1D temporal convolutions, achieving significantly higher efficiency. In addition, we introduce a dual-head adversarial distillation scheme, in which discriminators in both pixel and feature domains explicitly disentangle the discrimination of details and consistency into two heads, enabling both objectives to be effectively optimized without sacrificing one for the other. Experiments demonstrate that the resulting compressed AdcVSR model reduces complexity by 95% in parameters and achieves an 8× acceleration over its DiT teacher DOVE, while maintaining competitive video quality and efficiency.