High-Similarity-Pass Attention for Single Image Super-Resolution

Recent developments in the field of non-local attention (NLA) have led to a renewed interest in self-similarity-based single image super-resolution (SISR). Researchers usually used the NLA to explore non-local self-similarity (NSS) in SISR and achieve satisfactory reconstruction results. However, a surprising phenomenon that the reconstruction performance of the standard NLA is similar to the NLA with randomly selected regions stimulated our interest to revisit NLA. In this paper, we first analyzed the attention map of the standard NLA from different perspectives and discovered that the resulting probability distribution always has full support for every local feature, which implies a statistical waste of assigning values to irrelevant non-local features, especially for SISR which needs to model long-range dependence with a large number of redundant non-local features. Based on these findings, we introduced a concise yet effective soft thresholding operation to obtain high-similarity-pass attention (HSPA), which is beneficial for generating a more compact and interpretable distribution. Furthermore, we derived some key properties of the soft thresholding operation that enable training our HSPA in an end-to-end manner. The HSPA can be integrated into existing deep SISR models as an efficient general building block. In addition, to demonstrate the effectiveness of the HSPA, we constructed a deep high-similarity-pass attention network (HSPAN) by integrating a few HSPAs in a simple backbone. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that HSPAN outperforms state-of-the-art approaches on both quantitative and qualitative evaluations.

Properties and Potential Applications of Random Functional-Linked Types of Neural Networks

Random functional-linked types of neural networks (RFLNNs), e.g., the extreme learning machine (ELM) and broad learning system (BLS), which avoid suffering from a time-consuming training process, offer an alternative way of learning in deep structure. The RFLNNs have achieved excellent performance in various classification and regression tasks, however, the properties and explanations of these networks are ignored in previous research. This paper gives some insights into the properties of RFLNNs from the viewpoints of frequency domain, and discovers the presence of frequency principle in these networks, that is, they preferentially capture low-frequencies quickly and then fit the high frequency components during the training process. These findings are valuable for understanding the RFLNNs and expanding their applications. Guided by the frequency principle, we propose a method to generate a BLS network with better performance, and design an efficient algorithm for solving Poison's equation in view of the different frequency principle presenting in the Jacobi iterative method and BLS network.

Global Learnable Attention for Single Image Super-Resolution

Self-similarity is valuable to the exploration of non-local textures in single image super-resolution (SISR). Researchers usually assume that the importance of non-local textures is positively related to their similarity scores. In this paper, we surprisingly found that when repairing severely damaged query textures, some non-local textures with low-similarity which are closer to the target can provide more accurate and richer details than the high-similarity ones. In these cases, low-similarity does not mean inferior but is usually caused by different scales or orientations. Utilizing this finding, we proposed a Global Learnable Attention (GLA) to adaptively modify similarity scores of non-local textures during training instead of only using a fixed similarity scoring function such as the dot product. The proposed GLA can explore non-local textures with low-similarity but more accurate details to repair severely damaged textures. Furthermore, we propose to adopt Super-Bit Locality-Sensitive Hashing (SB-LSH) as a preprocessing method for our GLA. With the SB-LSH, the computational complexity of our GLA is reduced from quadratic to asymptotic linear with respect to the image size. In addition, the proposed GLA can be integrated into existing deep SISR models as an efficient general building block. Based on the GLA, we constructed a Deep Learnable Similarity Network (DLSN), which achieves state-of-the-art performance for SISR tasks of different degradation types (e.g. blur and noise). Our code and a pre-trained DLSN have been uploaded to GitHub{\dag} for validation.