Memory-Friendly Scalable Super-Resolution via Rewinding Lottery Ticket Hypothesis

Scalable deep Super-Resolution (SR) models are increasingly in demand, whose memory can be customized and tuned to the computational recourse of the platform. The existing dynamic scalable SR methods are not memory-friendly enough because multi-scale models have to be saved with a fixed size for each model. Inspired by the success of Lottery Tickets Hypothesis (LTH) on image classification, we explore the existence of unstructured scalable SR deep models, that is, we find gradual shrinkage sub-networks of extreme sparsity named winning tickets. In this paper, we propose a Memory-friendly Scalable SR framework (MSSR). The advantage is that only a single scalable model covers multiple SR models with different sizes, instead of reloading SR models of different sizes. Concretely, MSSR consists of the forward and backward stages, the former for model compression and the latter for model expansion. In the forward stage, we take advantage of LTH with rewinding weights to progressively shrink the SR model and the pruning-out masks that form nested sets. Moreover, stochastic self-distillation (SSD) is conducted to boost the performance of sub-networks. By stochastically selecting multiple depths, the current model inputs the selected features into the corresponding parts in the larger model and improves the performance of the current model based on the feedback results of the larger model. In the backward stage, the smaller SR model could be expanded by recovering and fine-tuning the pruned parameters according to the pruning-out masks obtained in the forward. Extensive experiments show the effectiveness of MMSR. The smallest-scale sub-network could achieve the sparsity of 94% and outperforms the compared lightweight SR methods.