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
Recent advances in diffusion models have shown impressive performance in controllable image generation and dense prediction tasks. However, existing approaches typically treat diffusion-based controllable generation and dense prediction as separate tasks, overlooking the potential benefits of jointly modeling the heterogeneous distributions.
arXiv:2512. 20963v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Diffusion models excel at generating high-quality, diverse samples, yet they risk memorizing training data when overfit to the training objective.
By Zekai Zhang, Xiao Li, Xiang Li, Lianghe Shi, Meng Wu, Molei Tao, Qing Qu
arXiv:2607. 06856v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Prior work suggests that diffusion representations capture low-level geometry but struggle with high-level semantics.
By Michael King, Aravindh Mahendran, Matthew Koichi Grimes, Fedor Kitashov, Adham Elarabawy, Pedro Velez, Maks Ovsjanikov, Viorica P\u{a}tr\u{a}ucean
arXiv:2605. 18714v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Unified multimodal models (UMMs) strive to consolidate visual understanding and visual generation within a single architecture.
By Songsong Yu, Yuxin Chen, Ying Shan, Yanwei Li
arXiv:2603. 28762v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Modern Text-to-Image (T2I) diffusion models have achieved remarkable semantic alignment, yet they often suffer from a significant lack of variety, converging on a narrow set of visual solutions for any given prompt.
By Omer Dahary, Benaya Koren, Daniel Garibi, Daniel Cohen-Or
arXiv:2607. 27372v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The deep learning revolution, kicked off by AlexNet, taught us that end-to-end training beats decomposing a problem into hand-designed stages.
By Alexi Gladstone, Heng Ji, Yilun Du
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.
By Jack Brady, Bernhard Sch\"olkopf, Thomas Kipf, Simon Buchholz, Wieland Brendel
arXiv:2506. 14202v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: End-to-end backpropagation requires storing activations throughout all layers, creating memory bottlenecks that limit model scalability.
By Makoto Shing, Masanori Koyama, Takuya Akiba
ARGenSeg introduces an autoregressive generation-based approach for image segmentation that integrates seamlessly with multimodal large language models (MLLMs). Unlike prior methods that use boundary points or dedicated segmentation heads, ARGenSeg generates dense masks directly through visual token output and detokenization via a universal VQ‑VAE, enabling fine‑grained pixel‑level perception. The framework employs a next‑scale‑prediction strategy to parallelize token generation, resulting in faster inference while outperforming state‑of‑the‑art segmentation models on multiple datasets.
By Xiaolong Wang, Lixiang Ru, Ziyuan Huang, Kaixiang Ji, Dandan Zheng, Jingdong Chen, Jun Zhou
arXiv:2605. 13974v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Diffusion Transformers (DiTs) and related flow-based architectures are now among the strongest text-to-image generators, yet the internal mechanisms through which prompts shape image semantics remain poorly understood.
By Evelyn Turri, Davide Bucciarelli, Sara Sarto, Lorenzo Baraldi, Marcella Cornia
arXiv:2602. 00797v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Flow-based methods have achieved significant success in various generative modeling tasks, capturing nuanced details within complex data distributions.
By Yakun Wang, Leyang Wang, Song Liu, Taiji Suzuki