QuantSR: Accurate Low-bit Quantization for Efficient Image Super-Resolution

Low-bit quantization in image super-resolution (SR) has attracted copious attention in recent research due to its ability to reduce parameters and operations significantly. However, many quantized SR models suffer from accuracy degradation compared to their full-precision counterparts, especially at ultra-low bit widths (2-4 bits), limiting their practical applications. To address this issue, we propose a novel quantized image SR network, called QuantSR, which achieves accurate and efficient SR processing under low-bit quantization. To overcome the representation homogeneity caused by quantization in the network, we introduce the Redistribution-driven Learnable Quantizer (RLQ). This is accomplished through an inference-agnostic efficient redistribution design, which adds additional information in both forward and backward passes to improve the representation ability of quantized networks. Furthermore, to achieve flexible inference and break the upper limit of accuracy, we propose the Depth-dynamic Quantized Architecture (DQA).