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Pixel-space diffusion has re-emerged as a promising alternative to latent-space generation because it avoids the representation bottleneck introduced by VAEs. Yet most existing methods still treat image generation as a frequency-homogeneous…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-05-08 Mingfeng Lin , Jiakun Chen , Liang Han , Liqiang Nie

Recent advances in latent diffusion models have achieved remarkable results in high-fidelity RGB image synthesis by leveraging pretrained VAEs to compress and reconstruct pixel data at low computational cost. However, the generation of…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-07-15 Zile Wang , Hao Yu , Jiabo Zhan , Chun Yuan

Diffusion models are widely recognized for their ability to generate high-fidelity images. Despite the excellent performance and scalability of the Diffusion Transformer (DiT) architecture, it applies fixed compression across different…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-04-15 Weinan Jia , Mengqi Huang , Nan Chen , Lei Zhang , Zhendong Mao

Recent progress in diffusion-based visual generation has largely relied on latent diffusion models with variational autoencoders (VAEs). While effective for high-fidelity synthesis, this VAE+diffusion paradigm suffers from limited training…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-03-03 Minglei Shi , Haolin Wang , Wenzhao Zheng , Ziyang Yuan , Xiaoshi Wu , Xintao Wang , Pengfei Wan , Jie Zhou , Jiwen Lu

Most visual generative models compress images into a latent space before applying diffusion or autoregressive modelling. Yet, existing approaches such as VAEs and foundation model aligned encoders implicitly constrain the latent space…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-12-09 Sen Ye , Jianning Pei , Mengde Xu , Shuyang Gu , Chunyu Wang , Liwei Wang , Han Hu

Latent generative modeling, where a pretrained autoencoder maps pixels into a latent space for the diffusion process, has become the standard strategy for Diffusion Transformers (DiT); however, the autoencoder component has barely evolved.…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-10-14 Boyang Zheng , Nanye Ma , Shengbang Tong , Saining Xie

Diffusion probabilistic models (DPMs) have shown remarkable results on various image synthesis tasks such as text-to-image generation and image inpainting. However, compared to other generative methods like VAEs and GANs, DPMs lack a…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2023-07-13 Yipeng Leng , Qiangjuan Huang , Zhiyuan Wang , Yangyang Liu , Haoyu Zhang

Modern generative models are usually designed to match target distributions directly in the data space, where the intrinsic dimension of data can be much lower than the ambient dimension. We argue that this discrepancy may contribute to the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-07-02 Zijun Zhang , Ruixiang Zhang , Zongpeng Li , Yoshua Bengio , Liam Paull

Despite the remarkable success of text-to-image diffusion models, their output of a single, flattened image remains a critical bottleneck for professional applications requiring layer-wise control. Existing solutions either rely on…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-03-18 Daichi Nagai , Ryugo Morita , Shunsuke Kitada , Hitoshi Iyatomi

The quality of the latent space in visual tokenizers (e.g., VAEs) is crucial for modern generative models. However, the standard reconstruction-based training paradigm produces a latent space that is biased towards low-level information,…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-03-09 Jingfeng Yao , Yuda Song , Yucong Zhou , Xinggang Wang

We present a novel method for constructing Variational Autoencoder (VAE). Instead of using pixel-by-pixel loss, we enforce deep feature consistency between the input and the output of a VAE, which ensures the VAE's output to preserve the…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2024-03-21 Xianxu Hou , Linlin Shen , Ke Sun , Guoping Qiu

As a widely recognized approach to deep generative modeling, Variational Auto-Encoders (VAEs) still face challenges with the quality of generated images, often presenting noticeable blurriness. This issue stems from the unrealistic…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-05-22 Georgios Batzolis , Jan Stanczuk , Carola-Bibiane Schönlieb

Generative modeling aims to generate new data samples that resemble a given dataset, with diffusion models recently becoming the most popular generative model. One of the main challenges of diffusion models is solving the problem in the…

Numerical Analysis · Mathematics 2025-10-08 Wonjun Lee , Riley C. W. O'Neill , Dongmian Zou , Jeff Calder , Gilad Lerman

Diffusion models have attained remarkable breakthroughs in the real-world super-resolution (SR) task, albeit at slow inference and high demand on devices. To accelerate inference, recent works like GenDR adopt step distillation to minimize…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-02-12 Yan Wang , Shijie Zhao , Junlin Li , Li Zhang

Generative models serve as powerful tools for modeling the real world, with mainstream diffusion models, particularly those based on the latent diffusion model paradigm, achieving remarkable progress across various tasks, such as image and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-04 Wanghan Xu , Xiaoyu Yue , Zidong Wang , Yao Teng , Wenlong Zhang , Xihui Liu , Luping Zhou , Wanli Ouyang , Lei Bai

Conventional class-guided diffusion models generally succeed in generating images with correct semantic content, but often struggle with texture details. This limitation stems from the usage of class priors, which only provide coarse and…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2024-10-14 Xiaoyu Yue , Zidong Wang , Zeyu Lu , Shuyang Sun , Meng Wei , Wanli Ouyang , Lei Bai , Luping Zhou

This paper examines three major generative modelling frameworks: Variational Autoencoders (VAEs), Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs), and Stable Diffusion models. VAEs are effective at learning latent representations but frequently…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2024-08-19 Sanchayan Vivekananthan

Autoencoders empower state-of-the-art image and video generative models by compressing pixels into a latent space through visual tokenization. Although recent advances have alleviated the performance degradation of autoencoders under high…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-01-14 Dongxu Liu , Jiahui Zhu , Yuang Peng , Haomiao Tang , Yuwei Chen , Chunrui Han , Zheng Ge , Daxin Jiang , Mingxue Liao

Representation Autoencoders (RAEs) have shown distinct advantages in diffusion modeling on ImageNet by training in high-dimensional semantic latent spaces. In this work, we investigate whether this framework can scale to large-scale,…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-01-23 Shengbang Tong , Boyang Zheng , Ziteng Wang , Bingda Tang , Nanye Ma , Ellis Brown , Jihan Yang , Rob Fergus , Yann LeCun , Saining Xie

Diffusion models have emerged as powerful generative approaches for missing-data imputation, yet most existing methods operate directly in data space and degrade when training data are heavily incomplete. We investigate whether shifting…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-28 Alberte Heering Estad , Ignacio Peis , Jes Frellsen