FoA-SR: Faithful or Aesthetic? Profile-Aware Preference Optimization for Real-World Image Super-Resolution

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2606.10275v1
• Date: Tue, 09 Jun 2026 00:44:59 GMT
• Title: FoA-SR: Faithful or Aesthetic? Profile-Aware Preference Optimization for Real-World Image Super-Resolution
• Abstract summary: We propose FoA-SR, a novel preference optimization approach to real-world image super-resolution based on profiles.<n>To achieve this goal, FoA-SR starts with our supervised FLUX.2-based SR adapter (Flux2SR) trained with LR latent conditioning, flow matching, and image-space reconstruction losses.<n>Experiments on RealSR and DIV2K show that FoA-SR can steer the same SR adapter towards distinct restoration objectives.
• Score: 11.365750371241155
• License: http://arxiv.org/licenses/nonexclusive-distrib/1.0/
• Abstract: Real-world image super-resolution (SR) is often designed with a single restoration objective, despite the current capacity of generative models to produce multiple high-quality reconstructions for the same input. In this paper, we argue that the best restoration strategy is subject to the specific restoration profile: a Faithful restoration prioritizes reference consistency, structure preservation, and hallucination suppression, whereas an Aesthetic restoration prioritizes visually pleasing and natural-looking details. We propose FoA-SR, a novel preference optimization approach to real-world SR based on profiles. To achieve this goal, FoA-SR starts with our supervised FLUX.2-based SR adapter (Flux2SR) trained with LR latent conditioning, flow matching, and image-space reconstruction losses for paired LR-to-HR image super-resolution. Following the development of the shared supervised super-resolution adapter, FoA-SR generates a shared stochastic candidate pool for each input image and ranks the same candidates using profile-specific Faithful and Aesthetic rewards to mine winner-loser pairs. These pairs are used to fine-tune separate LoRA adapters while keeping the base model frozen. Experiments on RealSR and DIV2K show that FoA-SR can steer the same SR adapter towards distinct restoration objectives: a Faithful adapter improves reference-consistent metrics while an Aesthetic adapter boosts metrics that measure perceptual quality without reference. Our candidate-pool analysis shows that Faithful and Aesthetic rewards frequently select different winners, and a Hybrid-LoRA ablation shows that collapsing both profiles into one reward yields an implicit compromise rather than explicit profile control.

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