This article reviews recent diffusion‑based methods for generative lossy image compression, highlighting how these techniques encode a source into an embedding and use a diffusion model to iteratively refine the reconstruction during decoding. It discusses the role of auxiliary entropy models for transmitting the embedding, explores the use of diffusion models for information transmission via channel simulation, and frames the discussion within rate‑distortion‑perception theory, common randomness, and inverse‑problem connections. The review also identifies open challenges in the field.
Most existing extreme compression methods fail to achieve an optimal rate-distortion-perception trade-off, as they typically prioritize perceptual fidelity and visual realism over pixel-level accuracy. Consequently, the resulting reconstructions often deviate noticeably from the originals.
The paper introduces RAE-CoD, a diffusion-based compression method that operates in a representation autoencoder space to preserve recognizable content even at extremely low bitrates. It addresses the problem of semantic collapse observed in existing codecs when the bitrate approaches zero, showing that reconstruction losses conflict with semantic objectives and that VAE diffusion models lose efficiency in preserving semantics. Experiments on MSCOCO-30K demonstrate that RAE-CoD outperforms competitors, reducing VFM feature MSE and Fréchet Distance ratios by at least 25.7% and 69.1% at 0.001–0.008 bpp while maintaining stable recognizability and quality.
arXiv:2608.20515v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Generative video compression can recover rich visual details at low bitrates, but simultaneously achieving high temporal consistency and low inference...
arXiv:2609.39451v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Progressive autoregressive image codecs provide an appealing paradigm for generative compression by quantizing continuous latents into discrete tokens,...
arXiv:2606. 30934v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Modern text-to-image diffusion models, such as diffusion transformers (DiT), rely on timestep or prompt embeddings to modulate the strength of the denoising process in each timestep.
Perceptual quality enhancement of severely compressed videos remains challenging due to complex artifact patterns and substantial information loss. Recent diffusion models have demonstrated strong generative capability for visual restoration, but directly applying them to compressed video often ignores compression degradation characteristics and may introduce structure-inconsistent hallucinations.
arXiv:2608.27885v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Multimodality translation (e.g., text-to-image) is a core generative AI task. However, existing approaches (1) follow generative paths that do not dire...
arXiv:2603.17546v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Perceptual video compression leverages generative priors to reconstruct realistic textures and motions at low bitrates. However, existing perceptua...
arXiv:2606.21030v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Diffusion-based image compression has achieved strong perceptual quality at ultra-low bitrates. However, existing codecs are often tied to sp...
arXiv:2608.24293v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Latent diffusion models have emerged as a dominant framework for high-fidelity image and video synthesis, operating in compact latent spaces with varia...
arXiv:2509. 05441v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Latent generative models compress images into learned embeddings prior to synthesis, and the generation quality critically depends on how faithfully these embeddings preserve visual detail.
arXiv:2609.24919v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Recent advances in pixel-space diffusion models have narrowed the image quality gap with latent-space diffusion, but still converge more slowly and lag...