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
Diffusion Trajectory Modeling (DTM) treats the evolving feature maps of diffusion models as temporally structured trajectories rather than static snapshots. By interpreting each spatial patch’s progression across multiple timesteps as a trajectory, DTM captures semantic correspondence cues that prior methods miss. Experiments on SPair-71k, SPair-U, and AP-10K demonstrate that DTM achieves strong performance, highlighting the semantic value embedded in the diffusion process’s temporal axis.
By Yusung Choi
DGCPath is a Distribution‑Aware Generative Contrastive framework designed for self‑supervised path representation learning. It combines a diffusion‑based view generator, a variational contrastive mechanism that aligns latent features at the distribution level, and a generative cross‑supervision module for view‑level consistency. Experiments on three real‑world trajectory datasets show that DGCPath surpasses state‑of‑the‑art baselines on two downstream tasks, indicating stronger generalization and representation effectiveness.
By Sean Bin Yang, Hao Miao, Zongyi Xu, Jilin Hu, Xiangmeng Wang, Hua Lu, Bin Yang, Christian S. Jensen
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:2609.40362v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: We present Multimodal Flow, a fully continuous generative model of language and vision. Most unified multimodal models either model both language and q...
By Hongyuan Tao, Xinggang Wang, Lianghui Zhu, Yongkang Li, Yunchao Wei, Bin Feng, Shaoyu Chen, Qian Zhang, Chang Huang, Kai Yu
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
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