QBasicVSR: Temporal Awareness Adaptation Quantization for Video Super-Resolution

Zhenwei Zhang, Fanhua Shang, Hongying Liu, Liang Wan, Wei Feng, Yanming Hui

Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 38 (NeurIPS 2025) Main Conference Track

While model quantization has become pivotal for deploying super-resolution (SR) networks on mobile devices, existing works focus on quantization methods only for image super-resolution. Different from image SR quantization, the temporal error propagation, shared temporal parameterization, and temporal metric mismatch significantly degrade the quantization performance of a video SR model. To address these issues, we propose the first quantization method, QBasicVSR, for video super-resolution. A novel temporal awareness adaptation post-training quantization (PTQ) framework for video super-resolution with the flow-gradient video bit adaptation and temporal shared layer bit adaptation is presented. Moreover, we put forward a novel fine-tuning method for VSR with the supervision of the full-precision model. Our method achieves extraordinary performance with state-of-the-art efficient VSR approaches, delivering up to $\times$200 faster processing speed while utilizing only 1/8 of the GPU resources. Additionally, extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed method significantly outperforms existing PTQ algorithms on various datasets. For instance, it attains a 2.53 dB increase on the UDM10 benchmark when quantizing BasicVSR to 4-bit with 100 unlabeled video clips. The code and models will be released on GitHub.