arXiv Machine Learning

Is Generation Required for Data-Efficient Perception?

arXiv:2512. 08854v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: It has been hypothesized that achieving the data efficiency of human visual perception requires a generative approach in which internal representations result from inverting a decoder.

arXiv Computer Vision
Aug 26

Representation Learning in Diffusion and Flow-based Model: An Application Aspect

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
arXiv AI
Jun 6

Image Generators are Generalist Vision Learners

arXiv:2604. 20329v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Recent works show that image and video generators exhibit zero-shot visual understanding behaviors, in a way reminiscent of how LLMs develop emergent capabilities of language understanding and reasoning from generative pretraining.

By Valentin Gabeur, Shangbang Long, Songyou Peng, Paul Voigtlaender, Shuyang Sun, Yanan Bao, Karen Truong, Zhicheng Wang, Wenlei Zhou, Jonathan T. Barron, Kyle Genova, Nithish Kannen, Sherry Ben, Yandong Li, Mandy Guo, Suhas Yogin, Yiming Gu, Huizhong Chen, Oliver Wang, Saining Xie, Howard Zhou, Kaiming He, Thomas Funkhouser, Jean-Baptiste Alayrac, Radu Soricut
arXiv AI
Jun 16

Token Reduction Should Go Beyond Efficiency in Generative Models -- From Vision, Language to Multimodality

arXiv:2505. 18227v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: In Transformer architectures, tokens\textemdash discrete units derived from raw data\textemdash are formed by segmenting inputs into fixed-length chunks.

By Zhenglun Kong, Yize Li, Fanhu Zeng, Lei Xin, Shvat Messica, Xue Lin, Pu Zhao, Manolis Kellis, Hao Tang, Marinka Zitnik
arXiv Computer Vision
Aug 31

Video Generative Models as Geometry Learner

The paper introduces GeoNeXt, a framework that repurposes pretrained video generative models for geometry estimation by framing it as a next‑frame prediction task. Unlike prior methods that either train separate depth/normal models or fine‑tune image diffusion backbones, GeoNeXt jointly models images and geometric targets, leveraging the structured knowledge of video models for more data‑efficient learning. Experiments show zero‑shot monocular depth and surface normal estimation that outperforms existing generative approaches and rivals discriminative state‑of‑the‑art methods while using far less training data.

By Haosen Yang, Jifei Song, Zhensong Zhang, Xiatian Zhu, Jiankang Deng