arXiv:2608. 10544v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Image restoration is fundamentally constrained by the tradeoff between distortion and perception: minimizing pixel-wise error yields over-smoothed results, whereas optimizing for perceptual realism often introduces structural deviations.
By Sangwoo Jo, Donggeun Ko, Jayeon Kang, Youngsang Kwak, Jaehwa Kwak, Sungjoon Choi
The paper introduces SCION, a single-model framework that jointly learns generative and self‑supervised representation tasks without relying on labels or pretrained encoders. SCION uses a pixel‑space encoder conditioned on a flow timestep and a shared embedding, training contrastive and flow‑matching objectives simultaneously with gradient‑norm balancing and stop‑gradient techniques. On ImageNet 256×256, SCION achieves state‑of‑the‑art FID scores (8.92 with JiT‑B and 5.89/3.47 with JiT‑L) surpassing prior class‑unconditional and pretrained‑conditioned methods.
By Vicente Balmaseda, Ching-Long Lin, Tianbao Yang
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
arXiv:2607. 29180v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Text-to-motion generation must produce motions that are semantically correct, temporally coherent, and physically plausible.
By Yifei Zhu, Mingyi Shi, Yangyang Cai, Miao Cheng, Yoshifumi Kitamura, Taku Komura
arXiv:2512.21004v2 Announce Type: replace
Abstract: Recent advances in pretraining general foundation models have significantly improved performance across diverse downstream tasks. While autoregress...
By Jinghan Li, Yang Jin, Hao Jiang, Yadong Mu, Yang Song, Kun Xu
WithinVAE is a compact variational visual autoencoder that learns semantic structure internally using a sequential bottleneck and self‑distillation from an exponential‑moving‑average copy of itself. It achieves a four‑fold compression ratio on ImageNet‑1K, improving reconstruction metrics such as PSNR by 1.36 dB over RPiAE while using half the latent capacity. The model also boosts linear probing performance, demonstrating that semantic gains arise from self‑distillation rather than external supervision.
By Yuzhou Ji, Jiepeng Wang, Tianyu Jin, Lizhuang Ma, Haibin Huang, Chi Zhang, Xuelong Li