arXiv Computer Vision
Oct 2

Sphere Encoder 2

Sphere Encoder 2 is an improved autoencoder that generates images by decoding random points from a high‑dimensional latent sphere. The original Sphere Encoder suffered from two key limitations: (1) random latent points cluster near the equator, a region never reached during training, creating a gap that hampers one‑step generation; (2) pixel‑wise reconstruction loss causes the decoder to average plausible images, resulting in blurry outputs lacking high‑frequency detail. Sphere Encoder 2 addresses both issues, yielding substantially better image quality while preserving the speed and simplicity of an autoencoder.

By Kaiyu Yue, Sean McLeish, Ruchit Rawal, Brian Bartoldson, Menglin Jia, Tom Goldstein
arXiv AI
Oct 19

Rethinking the design space of Vanilla Pixel Diffusion Transformers

The paper revisits pixel-space diffusion models, showing that a vanilla diffusion transformer can generate directly in pixel space by swapping velocity prediction for clean image prediction. It introduces MFlow, an adaptive parameterization that interpolates between these two prediction modes based on data representation and model capacity, and demonstrates competitive performance on ImageNet, UCF‑101, and text‑to‑image tasks. Additionally, the authors add ConvRefiner, a lightweight convolutional module trained post‑hoc to restore high‑frequency details while preserving FID.

By Soumik Mukhopadhyay, Long Mai, Abhinav Shrivastava, Aniruddha Mahapatra