Streaming-Aware Diffusion for Real-Time Video Super-Resolution via Cross-Step Attention

Real-time video super-resolution requires high spatio-temporal fidelity under strict latency constraints, challenging diffusion models due to their iterative sampling cost and limited temporal coordination. We propose a streaming-aware framework that adapts pretrained single-image latent diffusion models for efficient video super-resolution (VSR) by exploiting the sequential structure of video streams. Our Cross-Step Attention mechanism reuses intermediate denoising features across adjacent frames and diffusion steps, enabling temporal information exchange without explicit temporal modeling. We further introduce Trajectory-Coupled Diffusion Scheduling, which aligns adjacent diffusion states and provides cleaner intermediate representations for cross-step conditioning, improving temporal coherence. These components are integrated into a streaming inference pipeline that incrementally propagates latent states across frames, reducing the effective computational complexity from O(N · S) to O(N + S) for N frames and S diffusion steps. Experiments on REDS4 and YouHQ40-Test demonstrate improved perceptual quality and temporal realism while maintaining frame-wise stability. Our method achieves over 40 FPS at 512 × 512 resolution after cold start, enabling real-time VSR without explicit temporal modeling.