Papers › Swift Parameter-free Attention Network for Efficient Super-Resolution

Swift Parameter-free Attention Network for Efficient Super-Resolution

21 Nov 2023arXiv:2311.12770archive 2025-07-28

Cheng Wan, Hongyuan Yu, Zhiqi Li, Yihang Chen, Yajun Zou, Yuqing Liu, Xuanwu Yin, Kunlong Zuo

Single Image Super-Resolution (SISR) is a crucial task in low-level computer vision, aiming to reconstruct high-resolution images from low-resolution counterparts. Conventional attention mechanisms have significantly improved SISR performance but often result in complex network structures and large number of parameters, leading to slow inference speed and large model size. To address this issue, we propose the Swift Parameter-free Attention Network (SPAN), a highly efficient SISR model that balances parameter count, inference speed, and image quality. SPAN employs a novel parameter-free attention mechanism, which leverages symmetric activation functions and residual connections to enhance high-contribution information and suppress redundant information. Our theoretical analysis demonstrates the effectiveness of this design in achieving the attention mechanism's purpose. We evaluate SPAN on multiple benchmarks, showing that it outperforms existing efficient super-resolution models in terms of both image quality and inference speed, achieving a significant quality-speed trade-off. This makes SPAN highly suitable for real-world applications, particularly in resource-constrained scenarios. Notably, we won the first place both in the overall performance track and runtime track of the NTIRE 2024 efficient super-resolution challenge. Our code and models are made publicly available at https://github.com/hongyuanyu/SPAN.

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Code

hongyuanyu/span officialmentioned in papermentioned on GitHubpytorch report

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Tasks

Image Super-ResolutionSuper-Resolution

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

TaskDatasetModelMetricValueRank at snapshotLeaderboardReport
Image Super-Resolution Set14 - 4x upscaling SPAN PSNR 28.66 #55 of 104 Archive leaderboard report
Image Super-Resolution Set14 - 4x upscaling SPAN SSIM 0.7834 #55 of 104 Archive leaderboard report

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Methods

SPEED

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