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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.
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.
arXiv:2607. 06856v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Prior work suggests that diffusion representations capture low-level geometry but struggle with high-level semantics.
arXiv:2605. 18714v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Unified multimodal models (UMMs) strive to consolidate visual understanding and visual generation within a single architecture.
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.