Faithful Extreme Image Rescaling with Learnable Reversible Transformation and Semantic Priors

arXiv cs.CV / 5/4/2026

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Key Points

  • The paper introduces FaithEIR, a diffusion-based framework designed to improve extreme image rescaling (e.g., 16× or higher) while preserving semantically consistent structures.
  • FaithEIR uses a learnable reversible transformation inspired by SVD to perform invertible downscaling and upscaling in the latent space, reducing the ill-posedness of resolution mapping.
  • To address information loss from quantization, the method adds an adaptive detail prior implemented as a high-frequency dictionary learned from frequently occurring training structures.
  • It also incorporates a lightweight pixel semantic embedder to provide semantic conditioning to a pretrained diffusion model.
  • Experiments on reconstruction fidelity and perceptual quality show FaithEIR outperforming state-of-the-art approaches, with code and model releases available on GitHub.

Abstract

Most recent extreme rescaling methods struggle to preserve semantically consistent structures and produce realistic details, due to the severely ill-posed nature of low- to high-resolution mapping under scaling factors of 16\times or higher. To alleviate the above problems, we propose FaithEIR, a diffusion-based framework for extreme image rescaling. Inspired by singular value decomposition, we develop learnable reversible transformation that enables invertible downscaling and upscaling in the latent space. To compensate for information loss due to quantization, we propose an adaptive detail prior, a high-frequency dictionary that captures the empirical average of commonly occurring structures in the training data. Finally, we design a lightweight pixel semantic embedder to provide semantic conditioning for the pretrained diffusion model. We present extensive experimental results demonstrating that our FaithEIR consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods, achieving superior reconstruction fidelity and perceptual quality. Our code, model weights, and detailed results are released at https://github.com/cshw2021/FaithEIR.