# MaCo-GAN: Manifold-Contrastive Adversarial Learning for Single Image Super-Resolution

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.05068 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.05068/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 47 of its 56 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 3 Jun 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 47)

- [Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.11239/) (2020)
- [PyTorch: An Imperative Style, High-Performance Deep Learning Library](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.01703/) (2019)
- [U-Net: Convolutional Networks for Biomedical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.04597/) (2015)
- [A Simple Framework for Contrastive Learning of Visual Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.05709/) (2020)
- [The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Deep Features as a Perceptual Metric](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.03924/) (2018)
- [Diffusion Models Beat GANs on Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.05233/) (2021)
- [Representation Learning with Contrastive Predictive Coding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.03748/) (2018)
- [Momentum Contrast for Unsupervised Visual Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.05722/) (2019)
- [Classifier-Free Diffusion Guidance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.12598/) (2022)
- [Image-to-Image Translation with Conditional Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.07004/) (2016)
- [Taming Transformers for High-Resolution Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.09841/) (2020)
- [Supervised Contrastive Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.11362/) (2020)
- [Improved Baselines with Momentum Contrastive Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.04297/) (2020)
- [Photo-Realistic Single Image Super-Resolution Using a Generative Adversarial Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1609.04802/) (2016)
- [Unsupervised Feature Learning via Non-Parametric Instance-level Discrimination](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.01978/) (2018)
- [Enhanced Deep Residual Networks for Single Image Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1707.02921/) (2017)
- [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)
- [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)
- [Image Quality Assessment: Unifying Structure and Texture Similarity](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.07728/) (2020)
- [Language Model Beats Diffusion -- Tokenizer is Key to Visual Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.05737/) (2023)
- [Conditional Image Synthesis With Auxiliary Classifier GANs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1610.09585/) (2016)
- [MANIQA: Multi-dimension Attention Network for No-Reference Image Quality Assessment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.08958/) (2022)
- [Accelerating the Super-Resolution Convolutional Neural Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.00367/) (2016)
- [Deep Learning for Image Super-resolution: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.06068/) (2019)
- [PULSE: Self-Supervised Photo Upsampling via Latent Space Exploration of Generative Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.03808/) (2020)
- [Sketch-based Manga Retrieval using Manga109 Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1510.04389/) (2015)
- [An Image is Worth 32 Tokens for Reconstruction and Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.07550/) (2024)
- [The relativistic discriminator: a key element missing from standard GAN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.00734/) (2018)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Conventional Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) for Single Image Super-Resolution (SISR) often struggle with hallucinated artifacts, largely because standard discriminators evaluate overall image naturalness rather than strict conditional realism. To address this, we propose MaCo-GAN, a novel manifold-contrastive GAN framework that replaces the conventional adversarial loss with a supervised contrastive objective. A core component of our method is a dynamic fake sample synthesizer that transforms ground truth (GT) data into a spectrum of challenging, perceptually plausible fake images that strictly maintain low-resolution (LR) correspondence. Utilizing these synthesized samples, we establish a robust contrastive minimax game: the generator is trained to attract its predictions toward on-manifold fakes (low distortion) and repel them from off-manifold fakes (high distortion), while the discriminator optimizes the exact opposite. By simply replacing the adversarial loss of a baseline SR model with our proposed objective, we demonstrate consistent improvements in the perception-distortion trade-off across various benchmarks. Extensive ablation studies validate the effectiveness of our framework and provide deep insights into the dynamics of this conditional contrastive game.