LucidNFT: LR-Anchored Multi-Reward Preference Optimization for Flow-Based Real-World Super-Resolution

TL;DR

LucidNFT is a reinforcement learning framework that enhances flow-based real-world image super-resolution by improving fidelity, diversity, and robustness against real degradations through novel evaluation, normalization, and data collection strategies.

Contribution

It introduces LucidConsistency, a degradation-invariant evaluator, a decoupled reward normalization method, and a large-scale real-world degradation dataset for improved super-resolution.

Findings

Improves perceptual quality of flow-based Real-ISR models.

Maintains LR-referenced consistency across diverse real-world scenarios.

Enhances robustness against real-world degradations.

Abstract

Generative real-world image super-resolution (Real-ISR) can synthesize visually convincing details from severely degraded low-resolution (LR) inputs, yet its stochastic sampling makes a critical failure mode hard to avoid: outputs may look sharp but be unfaithful to the LR evidence, exhibiting semantic or structural hallucinations. Preference-based reinforcement learning (RL) is a natural fit because each LR input yields a rollout group of candidate restorations. However, effective alignment in Real-ISR is hindered by three coupled challenges: (i) the lack of an LR-referenced faithfulness signal that is robust to degradation yet sensitive to localized hallucinations, (ii) a rollout-group optimization bottleneck where scalarizing heterogeneous rewards before normalization compresses objective-wise contrasts and weakens DiffusionNFT-style reward-weighted updates, and (iii) limited coverage of real degradations, which restricts rollout diversity and preference signal quality. We propose LucidNFT, a multi-reward RL framework for flow-matching Real-ISR. LucidNFT introduces LucidConsistency, a degradation-invariant and hallucination-sensitive LR-referenced evaluator trained with content-consistent degradation pools and original-inpainted hard negatives; a decoupled reward normalization strategy that preserves objective-wise contrasts within each LR-conditioned rollout group before fusion; and LucidLR, a large-scale collection of real-world degraded images for robust RL fine-tuning. Extensive experiments show that LucidNFT improves perceptual quality on strong flow-based Real-ISR baselines while generally maintaining LR-referenced consistency across diverse real-world scenarios.