Navigating Beyond Dropout: An Intriguing Solution towards Generalizable Image Super Resolution

Hongjun Wang, Jiyuan Chen, Yinqiang Zheng, Tieyong Zeng; Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2024, pp. 25532-25543

Deep learning has led to a dramatic leap on Single Image Super-Resolution (SISR) performances in recent years. While most existing work assumes a simple and fixed degradation model (e.g. bicubic downsampling) the research of Blind SR seeks to improve model generalization ability with unknown degradation. Recently Kong et al. pioneer the investigation of a more suitable training strategy for Blind SR using Dropout. Although such method indeed brings substantial generalization improvements via mitigating overfitting we argue that Dropout simultaneously introduces undesirable side-effect that compromises model's capacity to faithfully reconstruct fine details. We show both the theoretical and experimental analyses in our paper and furthermore we present another easy yet effective training strategy that enhances the generalization ability of the model by simply modulating its first and second-order features statistics. Experimental results have shown that our method could serve as a model-agnostic regularization and outperforms Dropout on seven benchmark datasets including both synthetic and real-world scenarios.