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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.
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.
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.