{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/structural-similarity-inspired-unfolding-for","title":"Structural Similarity-Inspired Unfolding for Lightweight Image Super-Resolution","arxiv_id":"2506.11823","date":"2025-06-13","proceeding":null,"authors":["Zhangkai Ni","Yang Zhang","Wenhan Yang","Hanli Wang","Shiqi Wang","Sam Kwong"],"abstract":"Major efforts in data-driven image super-resolution (SR) primarily focus on expanding the receptive field of the model to better capture contextual information. However, these methods are typically implemented by stacking deeper networks or leveraging transformer-based attention mechanisms, which consequently increases model complexity. In contrast, model-driven methods based on the unfolding paradigm show promise in improving performance while effectively maintaining model compactness through sophisticated module design. Based on these insights, we propose a Structural Similarity-Inspired Unfolding (SSIU) method for efficient image SR. This method is designed through unfolding an SR optimization function constrained by structural similarity, aiming to combine the strengths of both data-driven and model-driven approaches. Our model operates progressively following the unfolding paradigm. Each iteration consists of multiple Mixed-Scale Gating Modules (MSGM) and an Efficient Sparse Attention Module (ESAM). The former implements comprehensive constraints on features, including a structural similarity constraint, while the latter aims to achieve sparse activation. In addition, we design a Mixture-of-Experts-based Feature Selector (MoE-FS) that fully utilizes multi-level feature information by combining features from different steps. Extensive experiments validate the efficacy and efficiency of our unfolding-inspired network. Our model outperforms current state-of-the-art models, boasting lower parameter counts and reduced memory consumption. Our code will be available at: https://github.com/eezkni/SSIU","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.11823v1","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.11823v1.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"abstracts"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"structural-similarity-inspired-unfolding-for","repo_url":"https://github.com/eezkni/ssiu","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":1,"framework":"pytorch","reach":null}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"image-super-resolution","task_name":"Image Super-Resolution"},{"task_slug":"mixture-of-experts","task_name":"Mixture-of-Experts"},{"task_slug":"super-resolution","task_name":"Super-Resolution"}],"methods":[{"method_slug":"focus","method_name":"Focus"}],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"syntology_url":null,"atlas_url":null,"mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}