arXiv:2607. 05319v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We study why diffusion autoencoders can achieve similar image quality while learning substantially different latent structures.
By Rajat Rasal, Avinash Kori, Tian Xia, Ben Glocker
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.
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
The paper introduces DiffPT, a diffusion‑based pretraining method for classifier backbones aimed at improving performance when training data is scarce. Experiments on time‑series, natural image, and medical imaging datasets show that DiffPT outperforms many self‑supervised baselines, especially in low‑data regimes for medical and time‑series tasks. While contrastive pretraining remains superior on CIFAR‑10 and Tiny ImageNet, DiffPT offers a simple and effective alternative across diverse modalities.
By Qinyu Li, Yee Whye Teh, Chris Holmes, Joel Jaskari
The paper introduces D3S2, a diffusion‑guided dataset distillation framework tailored for semantic segmentation. It tackles long‑tailed class imbalance, pixel‑wise alignment, and high computational cost by first selecting class‑balanced masks and then synthesizing images with a pretrained diffusion model conditioned on those masks. Guided diffusion sampling further refines the data with segmentation‑consistency and class‑wise feature matching losses, achieving superior performance at a 1% compression rate on ADE20K and COCO‑Stuff.
By Wenjie Zheng, Haoji Hu, Jiali Lu, Xingze Zou, Jing Wang
Latent Diffusion-GAN (LD‑GAN) integrates adversarial learning into diffusion models by using the pretrained VAE as an energy‑based discriminator, avoiding extra parameters and preserving the latent priors. It introduces a structural consistency energy to align encoder and decoder features, improving perceptual quality. Experiments show LD‑GAN enhances sample fidelity, sharpness, and diversity across generation tasks while maintaining efficient training dynamics.