HGLN: Hybrid Gated Large-Kernel Network for Lightweight Image Super-Resolution

Recent large-kernel based SISR methods often struggle to balance global structural consistency with local texture preservation while maintaining computational efficiency. To address this, we propose the Hybrid Gated Large-kernel Network (HGLN). First, the Hybrid Multi-Scale Aggregation (HMSA) decouples features into structural and detailed streams via dual-path processing, utilizing a modified Large Kernel Attention to capture long-range interactions. Second, the Local–Global Synergistic Attention (LGSA) recalibrates features by integrating local spatial context with dual global statistics (mean and standard deviation). Finally, the Structure-Gated Feed-forward Network (SGFN) leverages high-frequency residuals to modulate the gating mechanism for precise edge restoration. Extensive experiments demonstrate that HGLN outperforms state-of-the-art methods. Notably, on the challenging Urban100 dataset (×4), HGLN achieves significant PSNR gains with extremely low complexity (only 11G Multi-Adds), proving its suitability for resource-constrained applications.