The article surveys how diffusion and flow-based generative models learn rich visual representations and how these representations can be used to improve generation and other perception tasks. It introduces a three-tier framework that categorizes work into improving generative quality via representation learning, extracting representations for perception, and developing unified applications. The survey covers downstream tasks such as image classification, dense prediction, instance-level perception, and annotation-scarce scenarios, offering a taxonomy and highlighting future research directions.
By Yanchen Xu, Sida Huang, Zhenyu Gu, Ruishu Zhu, Yilan Gao, Hongyuan Zhang
Diffusion models and flow-based models have recently become the dominant paradigms in generative modeling, largely due to their ability to learn rich, multi-level visual representations through large-...
arXiv:2606. 09718v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Diffusion models have demonstrated remarkable generative capabilities and have also emerged as powerful self-supervised representation learners, yet the connection between these two abilities remains less explored.
By Xiao Li, Yixuan Jia, Zekai Zhang, Xiang Li, Lianghe Shi, Jinxin Zhou, Zhihui Zhu, Liyue Shen, Qing Qu
arXiv:2607. 05319v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We study why diffusion autoencoders can achieve similar image quality while learning substantially different latent structures.
By Rajat Rasal, Avinash Kori, Tian Xia, Ben Glocker
arXiv:2606. 31699v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) have recently been proposed as interpretable tools for concept-level manipulation, under the assumption that isolated features can serve as controllable intervention points.
By Enrico Cassano, Riccardo Renzulli, Rayyan Ahmed, Marco Grangetto, Stephan Alaniz
arXiv:2501. 09876v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Generative modeling aims to generate new data samples that resemble a given dataset.
By Wonjun Lee, Riley C. W. O'Neill, Dongmian Zou, Jeff Calder, Gilad Lerman
arXiv:2610.01723v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Text-to-image diffusion models have achieved remarkable progress in image synthesis, yet can exhibit memorization by closely reproducing individual tra...
By Hyungjun Joo, Sehwan Kim, Hyeonggeun Han, Sangwoo Hong, Jungwoo Lee
arXiv:2609.40305v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Improving text-to-image models has traditionally relied on increasing model size or the number of denoising steps. In this work, we explore an alternat...
By Yong Xien Chng, Tianyi Chen, Wenwen Tong, Haiwen Diao, Zhongang Cai, Lei Yang, Ziwei Liu, Lewei Lu, Dahua Lin, Gao Huang
The paper introduces Abra, a family of flow‑matching transformers used to systematically study scaling laws for text‑to‑image diffusion models across three orders of magnitude in compute. It finds that diffusion models scale predictably like language models but need far more data, with compute optimality occurring at roughly 200 image tokens per parameter—ten times the optimal ratio for large language models. The study also shows that diffusion models are robust to overtraining, that more data is preferable to larger models, and that scaling predictability extends to generative quality, optimal CFG settings, representation quality, and training curve shapes.
By Kyle Chickering, Wei-An Lin, Swayam Bhanded, Dan Saunders, Akshat Tripathi, Jiaming Song, Shyamal Buch, Xinchen Yan
V-Co investigates visual co-denoising for pixel-space diffusion models, using a unified JiT-based framework to isolate key design choices. The study identifies two essential components: a dual-stream architecture with flexible cross-stream interaction and a perceptual-drifting hybrid loss combined with RMS-based feature rescaling for stronger semantic supervision. Experiments on ImageNet-256 demonstrate that V-Co surpasses baseline pixel-space diffusion and strong prior pixel-diffusion methods at comparable model sizes while requiring fewer training epochs.
By Han Lin, Xichen Pan, Zun Wang, Yue Zhang, Chu Wang, Jaemin Cho, Mohit Bansal
arXiv:2609.08253v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Diffusion models have shown remarkable performance on diverse generation tasks. Recent work finds that imposing representation alignment on the hidden...
By Yuehao Wang, Peihao Wang, Hanwen Jiang, Ziyi Yang, Qixing Huang, Zhangyang Wang
The paper investigates diffusion models trained in a lazy high‑dimensional regime, extending benign overfitting theory to generative settings. By analyzing denoising score matching in a vector‑valued RKHS with an inner‑product kernel, the authors derive exact risk trajectories under gradient flow when the number of samples scales proportionally with dimensionality. These trajectories reveal three distinct phases—spectral generalization, noise‑dominated interpolation, and empirical Bayes memorization—whose interplay shapes the distribution of generated samples.
By Hugo Latourelle-Vigeant, Sinho Chewi, Aram-Alexandre Pooladian, John Sous, Theodor Misiakiewicz