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Adaptive Sparse Self-Attention for Efficient Image Super-Resolution and Beyond

delete2026-03-06
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PRE
AI
J
Jinshan Pan
L
Long Sun
L
Lianhong Song
J
Jiangxin Dong
J
Jian Yang
M
Maocheng Zhao
唐金辉 cover
唐金辉 (Jinhui Tang)
DOI:10.1109/TPAMI.2026.3670856delete
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Abstract

Abstract

En 中文
Benefiting from the effectiveness of the self-attention mechanisms in the Transformer framework for modeling non-local features of images, significant progress has been achieved in image super-resolution. We note that existing self-attention mechanisms usually explore all similarities of the tokens between the queries and keys for the feature aggregation. However, using all the similarities does not effectively facilitate the high-quality image reconstruction as not all the tokens from the queries are relevant to those in keys. We further note that self-attention mechanisms are less effective for local feature exploration, which are less effective for the structural detail restoration. To overcome these problems, we develop a simple yet effective adaptive sparse self-attention method to utilize the most useful information of tokens for image restoration. We first develop a local spatial-variant feature estimation method to build the query and key used in the self-attention so that local information can be better modeled. Then, we present a simple yet effective sparse self-attention to adaptively select the most useful similarity values from the self-attention matrix for better the feature aggregation. We analyze that the proposed method models both local and non-local features and thus facilitates better structural detail restoration. We further show that the proposed method can serve as an alternative to existing self-attention mechanisms for better image restoration. Experimental results show that the proposed method performs favorably against state-of-the-art ones on benchmark datasets in terms of accuracy and model complexity.
Keywords:
Transformer
sparse self-attention
deep discriminative learning
image restoration
image super-resolution

Journal

IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence cover
IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence
IF:
18.6
Papers:
831
Citations:
9.8W

Organization

N
nanjing university of science and technology
Scholars:
3.7K
Papers: 1.2K
Citations: 0
N
nanjing forestry university
Scholars:
4.9K
Papers: 1.7K
Citations: 0