The paper investigates how visual representations contribute to pixel diffusion transformers and finds that higher representation quality does not always improve generative performance, and that separating architecture into specialized decoders mainly redistributes modeling rather than enhancing generative suitability. Based on these findings, the authors propose Representation Guidance (RG), a method that compacts generation-relevant information into a low-dimensional bottleneck and explicitly uses it to steer decoder generation. RG achieves state‑of‑the‑art results on ImageNet 256×256 with fewer parameters, scales efficiently, and extends to text‑to‑image tasks with strong benchmark performance.
By Zihao Pan, Mengting Chen, Cheng Shi, Taihang Hu, Zhengrong Yue, Zikang Wang, Yuan Wang, Wei Li, Sibei Yang
AlignMorph is a tuning‑free diffusion framework for image morphing that separates geometric alignment from generative denoising. It uses Global Semantic Transport—entropic optimal transport and reliability‑aware latent warping—to achieve diffusion‑compatible semantic alignment, and Coordinate‑Aligned Generation—symmetric bi‑phase attention handoff—to preserve spatial coordinates during denoising. The method eliminates ghosting and delivers superior structural coherence and temporal smoothness on morphing benchmarks without any per‑pair optimization.
By Wuyi Liu, Xu Han, Yuren Chen, Yige Mao, Zishuo Peng, Xianzhi Li
PixelMoE introduces a pixel-space generative framework that applies LLM-style Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) to diffusion models, enabling sparse scaling of model capacity without diffusion-specific routing. The approach combines Token-Choice routing, fine-grained routed experts, a shared expert, and bias-based load balancing, while also employing Pixel-Space Hierarchical Flow Matching to adjust spatial resolution during denoising. PixelMoE outperforms dense counterparts at comparable active parameter counts, achieving strong FID scores on class-conditional ImageNet-1K.
The paper investigates why Diffusion Transformers perform well when predicting clean data but poorly when predicting noise or velocity. It introduces the concept of *residual-stream burden*, explaining that noisy targets force the residual stream to carry noise-dependent variation through the network, limiting representation flexibility. Experiments show that spectral concentration of clean targets reduces this burden, and the authors propose Spatially Indexed Hyper-Connections (SiHC) to expand residual bandwidth, achieving state‑of‑the‑art FID on ImageNet.
By Tongtong Liang, Siqi Kou, Ziqiao Xi, Esha Singh, Kun Zhou, Zhijie Deng, Alexander Cloninger, Yu-Xiang Wang, Rahul Parhi
arXiv:2608.29997v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: We propose Discrete Diffusion Bridges (DDB), a novel framework designed to resolve the fundamental spatiotemporal misalignment of standard discrete dif...
By Xing Xie, Jiawei Liu, Shijun Zhou, Huijie Fan, Zhi Han, Yandong Tang, Liangqiong Qu
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...
By Yongsheng Yu, Wei Xiong, Yichen Sheng, Shiqiu Liu, Jiebo Luo
arXiv:2606. 27978v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Pixel-space continuous-token autoregressive (AR) generation directly models images as sequences of raw pixel patches, avoiding discrete tokenization or a separately pretrained tokenizer.
By Jiayi Xu, Di He, Guolin Ke
Unified image restoration (UIR) aims to recover high-quality (HQ) content from low-quality (LQ) images with different degradations using a single model. Most recent methods adapt large pretrained text-to-image (T2I) latent diffusion models for their strong capacity and generative priors.
arXiv:2610.09450v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Pixel-space diffusion models avoid the lossy VAE of latent models, which suggests an advantage on downstream tasks where fine-grained detail matters. W...
By Hanqiu Li Cai (SperidLabs), Chema Garabito (SperidLabs)
arXiv:2606. 00094v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Image generative models aim to sample data points from the underlying data manifold, a task that requires learning and decoding a dense, low-dimensional, and compact parameterization space.
By Duoduo Xue, Zhiyu Zhu, Junhui Hou
arXiv:2609.39222v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: High-compression tokenizers are essential for scaling latent image generative models. However, aggressive compression creates a fundamental tradeoff be...
By Xu Huang, Ye Huang, Zijun Liao, Yuwei Niu, Xiaojie Li, Menghan Zhou, De Wen Soh, Xiaotong Li, Daquan Zhou
Pixel-space generative models bypass lossy latent compression, yet necessitate joint learning of global structure and fine-grained details in a high-dimensional space. Standard flow matching interpolates noise toward a fixed clean-image endpoint, leaving the spectral evolution to be learned implicitly.