DUO-VSR: Dual-Stream Distillation for One-Step Video Super-Resolution

TL;DR

DUO-VSR introduces a three-stage dual-stream distillation framework that unifies distribution matching and adversarial supervision to enable efficient one-step video super-resolution with improved visual quality.

Contribution

The paper proposes DUO-VSR, a novel three-stage framework combining distribution matching and adversarial supervision for stable and efficient one-step video super-resolution.

Findings

Achieves superior visual quality compared to previous methods.

Demonstrates significant efficiency improvements in VSR.

Provides stable training through trajectory-preserving distillation.

Abstract

Diffusion-based video super-resolution (VSR) has recently achieved remarkable fidelity but still suffers from prohibitive sampling costs. While distribution matching distillation (DMD) can accelerate diffusion models toward one-step generation, directly applying it to VSR often results in training instability alongside degraded and insufficient supervision. To address these issues, we propose DUO-VSR, a three-stage framework built upon a Dual-Stream Distillation strategy that unifies distribution matching and adversarial supervision for one-step VSR. Firstly, a Progressive Guided Distillation Initialization is employed to stabilize subsequent training through trajectory-preserving distillation. Next, the Dual-Stream Distillation jointly optimizes the DMD and Real-Fake Score Feature GAN (RFS-GAN) streams, with the latter providing complementary adversarial supervision leveraging discriminative features from both real and fake score models. Finally, a Preference-Guided Refinement stage further aligns the student with perceptual quality preferences. Extensive experiments demonstrate that DUO-VSR achieves superior visual quality and efficiency over previous one-step VSR approaches.