# MIAR: Medical Image Super-Resolution With Autoregressive Modeling

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.26103 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.26103/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 16 of its 19 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 5 Aug 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 16 of 16)

- [High-Resolution Image Synthesis with Latent Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.10752/) (2021)
- [SwinIR: Image Restoration Using Swin Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.10257/) (2021)
- [MUSIQ: Multi-scale Image Quality Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.05997/) (2021)
- [Visual Autoregressive Modeling: Scalable Image Generation via Next-Scale Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.02905/) (2024)
- [Image Quality Assessment: Unifying Structure and Texture Similarity](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.07728/) (2020)
- [Autoregressive Model Beats Diffusion: Llama for Scalable Image Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.06525/) (2024)
- [MANIQA: Multi-dimension Attention Network for No-Reference Image Quality Assessment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.08958/) (2022)
- [ImageFolder: Autoregressive Image Generation with Folded Tokens](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.01756/) (2024)
- [Multi-Modal Transformer for Accelerated MR Imaging](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.14248/) (2021)
- [Visual Autoregressive Modeling for Image Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.18993/) (2025)
- [Rethinking Diffusion Model for Multi-Contrast MRI Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.04785/) (2024)
- [DisC-Diff: Disentangled Conditional Diffusion Model for Multi-Contrast MRI Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.13933/) (2023)
- [Multimodal Multi-Head Convolutional Attention with Various Kernel Sizes for Medical Image Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.04218/) (2022)
- [Deform-Mamba Network for MRI Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.05969/) (2024)
- [Low-Cost Implementation of Bilinear and Bicubic Image Interpolation for Real-Time Image Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.09622/) (2020)
- [High-Resolution Pelvic MRI Reconstruction Using a Generative Adversarial Network with Attention and Cyclic Loss](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.09989/) (2021)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Medical Image Super-Resolution (MISR) aims to enhance spatial resolution without requiring hardware modifications. Although deep learning has yielded promising results, existing paradigms face a critical trade-off: diffusion-based methods suffer from prohibitive inference latency and compromised structural fidelity, whereas regression-based models typically produce over-smoothed results that lack perceptual realism. To address these limitations, we propose MIAR, which reformulates super-resolution as a conditional and progressive next-scale prediction task through a multi-scale autoregressive framework. To ensure structural fidelity, we augment the autoregressive backbone with a Scale-Adaptive Structural Decoder. Furthermore, we integrate a hierarchical beam search strategy during inference to mitigate the recursive error accumulation inherent in autoregressive generation, a phenomenon that is especially pronounced in medical images. Extensive experiments demonstrate that MIAR establishes new state-of-the-art benchmarks while maintaining superior fidelity. Notably, our framework achieves a 7.86% improvement in the perceptual metric MUSIQ compared with the state of the art, while simultaneously delivering a 2.02x speedup over diffusion-based methods.