Diffusion Models

Ask about this topic

Overview

Diffusion models learn a data distribution by gradually corrupting examples with noise and training a denoiser to reverse that process. Major approaches include DDPMs and score-based SDEs, latent diffusion and diffusion Transformers, flow and consistency methods, and discrete masked or continuous-time Markov diffusion; conditioning and guidance adapt them to specific tasks. They are used for images, video, audio, language, molecules, and scientific forecasting, with evaluations ranging from ImageNet FID to language perplexity and domain-specific measures of accuracy and uncertainty. A central tension is how to make sampling faster and generation more controllable without sacrificing quality, calibration, or diversity, while theory and ongoing audits address generalization, memorization, and privacy.

Latest papers

CardsList

1,192 papers152 papers in the last four weeks, up 77% on the four weeks before. 0.9% of all new papers.

  1. Permutation-Symmetrized Diffusion for Unconditional Molecular Generation

    Mar 24, 2026Gyeonghoon Ko, Juho LeeMolecular GenerationDiffusion Models

    Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology

  2. Gimbal360: Canonicalizing Planar Diffusion for Spherical Panorama Completion

    Mar 24, 2026Yuqin Lu, Haofeng Liu, Yang Zhou +4Diffusion ModelsDiffusion Models for Image Restoration

  3. Asymptotic Learning Curves for Diffusion Models with Random Features Score and Manifold Data

    Mar 24, 2026Anand Jerry George, Nicolas MacrisIntrinsic DimensionalityRandom Feature Methods

    École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), Lab for Statistical Mechanics of Inference in Large Systems (SMILS), CH-1015 Lausanne, Switzerland

  4. Tiny Inference-Time Scaling with Latent Verifiers

    Mar 23, 2026Davide Bucciarelli, Evelyn Turri, Lorenzo Baraldi +3Inference-Time ScalingDiffusion Models

    University of Modena and Reggio Emilia, Italy · University of Pisa, Italy

  5. Repurposing Geometric Foundation Models for Multi-view Diffusion

    Mar 23, 2026Wooseok Jang, Seonghu Jeon, Jisang Han +5Multi-View Diffusion ModelsNovel View Synthesis

    KAIST AI · New York University · Intel Labs

  6. DA-VAE: Plug-in Latent Compression for Diffusion via Detail Alignment

    Mar 23, 2026Xin Cai, Zhiyuan You, Zhoutong Zhang +1Diffusion-Based Image GenerationDiffusion Model Compression

    Multimedia Laboratory, The Chinese University of Hong Kong · Shanghai AI Laboratory · Adobe NextCam +1

  7. Tuning Real-World Image Restoration at Inference: A Test-Time Scaling Paradigm for Flow Matching Models

    Mar 23, 2026Purui Bai, Junxian Duan, Pin Wang +4Image RestorationDiffusion Models

    MAIS & NLPR, Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences, China · Kuaishou Tech, China

  8. IPSL-AID: Generative Diffusion Models for Climate Downscaling from Global to Regional Scales

    Mar 23, 2026Kishanthan Kingston, Olivier Boucher, Freddy Bouchet +5Climate DownscalingPrecipitation Downscaling

    Climate Modeling Center, Sorbonne University, CNRS, IPSL, Paris, France · LMD, CNRS, ENS/PSL, Sorbonne University, IPSL, Paris, France · Climate Modeling and Analysis, LLC, Superior, CO, USA +1

  9. SHARP: Spectrum-aware Highly-dynamic Adaptation for Resolution Promotion in Remote Sensing Synthesis

    Mar 23, 2026Bingxuan Zhao, Qing Zhou, Chuang Yang +2Rotary Positional EmbeddingsDiffusion Transformer

    Northwestern Polytechnical University, Xi’an, China · The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hong Kong, China

  10. Generalized Discrete Diffusion from Snapshots

    Mar 22, 2026Oussama Zekri, Théo Uscidda, Nicolas Boullé +1Diffusion ModelsDiffusion Language Models

    CREST, ENSAE, Institut Polytechnique de Paris, Paris, France · Department of Mathematics, Imperial College London, London, SW7 2AZ, UK

  11. ReDiffuse: Rotation Equivariant Diffusion Model for Multi-focus Image Fusion

    Mar 22, 2026Bo Li, Tingting Bao, Lingling Zhang +3Multi-Source Image FusionDiffusion Models

    School of Computer Science and Technology, Xi’an Jiaotong University, Xi’an, Shaanxi, China · School of Information Engineering, Chang’an University, Xi’an, Shaanxi, China

  12. LPNSR: Learnable Noise Prediction for Diffusion-Based Image Super-Resolution

    Mar 22, 2026Shuwei Huang, Shizhuo Liu, Zijun WeiImage Super-ResolutionDiffusion Models

    Huazhong University of Science and Technology

  13. Interpreting the Synchronization Gap: The Hidden Mechanism Inside Diffusion Transformers

    Mar 22, 2026Emil Albrychiewicz, Andrés Franco Valiente, Li-Ching Chen +1Diffusion ModelsDiffusion Transformer

    Leinweber Institute for Theoretical Physics and Department of Physics, University of California, Berkeley, CA, 94720-7300, USA · Theoretical Physics Group, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Berkeley, CA 94720-8162, USA · Department of Radiation Oncology, University of California, San Francisco +2

  14. Diffusion Model for Manifold Data: Score Decomposition, Curvature, and Statistical Complexity

    Mar 21, 2026Zixuan Zhang, Kaixuan Huang, Tuo Zhao +2Diffusion ModelsStatistical Learning Theory

    Georgia Tech · Princeton University · Northwestern University

  15. Generating from Discrete Distributions Using Diffusions: Insights from Random Constraint Satisfaction Problems

    Mar 21, 2026Alankrita Bhatt, Mukur Gupta, Germain Kolossov +1Diffusion SamplingDiffusion Models

    Granica Computing Inc. – granica.ai · Stanford University

  16. Improving Diffusion Generalization with Weak-to-Strong Segmented Guidance

    Mar 21, 2026Liangyu Yuan, Yufei Huang, Mingkun Lei +5Diffusion Model GuidanceDiffusion Models

    Westlake University · Tongji University · Zhejiang University +1

  17. Beyond Single Tokens: Distilling Discrete Diffusion Models via Discrete MMD

    Mar 20, 2026Emiel Hoogeboom, David Ruhe, Jonathan Heek +2Diffusion Model DistillationDiffusion Models

    Google DeepMind Amsterdam

  18. How Out-of-Equilibrium Phase Transitions can Seed Pattern Formation in Trained Diffusion Models

    Mar 20, 2026Luca AmbrogioniDiffusion Models

    Radboud University, Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition, and Behaviour

  19. On the role of memorization in learned priors for geophysical inverse problems

    Mar 20, 2026Ali Siahkoohi, Davide SabedduMemorization in Generative ModelsInverse Problems

    University of Central Florida

  20. SeeClear: Reliable Transparent Object Depth Estimation via Generative Opacification

    Mar 20, 2026Xiaoying Wang, Yumeng He, Jingkai Shi +4Depth EstimationMonocular Depth Estimation

    University of California, Los Angeles. · University of Southern California. · University of Utah.

  21. TRACE: Trajectory Recovery with State Propagation Diffusion for Urban Mobility

    Mar 19, 2026Jinming Wang, Hai Wang, Hongkai Wen +2Trajectory ReconstructionDiffusion Models

    University of Exeter Department of Computer Science Exeter, United Kingdom · Jingdong Logistics Beijing, China · University of Warwick Department of Computer Science Coventry, United Kingdom

  22. Cubic Discrete Diffusion: Discrete Visual Generation on High-Dimensional Representation Tokens

    Mar 19, 2026Yuqing Wang, Chuofan Ma, Zhijie Lin +7Image GenerationDiffusion-Based Image Generation

    University of Hong Kong · ByteDance Seed · Carnegie Mellon University +2

  23. Rethinking Vector Field Learning for Generative Segmentation

    Mar 19, 2026Chaoyang Wang, Yaobo Liang, Boci Peng +3Semantic SegmentationDiffusion Models

    Peking University · Baidu

  24. DreamPartGen: Semantically Grounded Part-Level 3D Generation via Collaborative Latent Denoising

    Mar 19, 2026Tianjiao Yu, Xinzhuo Li, Muntasir Wahed +4Part-Level 3D Generation3D Shape Generation

    University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

  25. RPiAE: A Representation-Pivoted Autoencoder Enhancing Both Image Generation and Editing

    Mar 19, 2026Yue Gong, Hongyu Li, Shanyuan Liu +8T2I Diffusion ModelsDiffusion-Based Image Generation

    Beihang University · AI Research · The Chinese University of Hong Kong

  26. Towards Infinitely Long Neural Simulations: Self-Refining Neural Surrogate Models for Dynamical Systems

    Mar 18, 2026Qi Liu, Laure Zanna, Joan BrunaNeural Surrogate ModelingAutoregressive Modeling

    Courant Institute School of Mathematics, Computing, and Data Science, New York University, USA.

  27. FrescoDiffusion: 4K Image-to-Video with Prior-Regularized Tiled Diffusion

    Mar 18, 2026Hugo Caselles-Dupré, Mathis Koroglu, Guillaume Jeanneret +2High-Resolution Video GenerationImage-to-Video Generation

    Obvious Research, Paris, France · Sorbonne Université, CNRS, ISIR, F-75005 Paris, France · Valeo.ai, France

  28. Learning Permutation Distributions via Reflected Diffusion on Ranks

    Mar 18, 2026Sizhuang He, Yangtian Zhang, Shiyang Zhang +1Diffusion Models

    Department of Computer Science, Yale University, New Haven, CT, USA.

  29. V-Co: A Closer Look at Visual Representation Alignment via Co-Denoising

    Mar 17, 2026Han Lin, Xichen Pan, Zun Wang +4Diffusion Model AlignmentPixel-Space Diffusion Models

    1UNC Chapel Hill · 2NYU · 3Meta +1

  30. Iris: Bringing Real-World Priors into Diffusion Model for Monocular Depth Estimation

    Mar 17, 2026Xinhao Cai, Gensheng Pei, Zeren Sun +3Monocular Depth EstimationDiffusion Models

    Nanjing University of Science and Technology · State Key Laboratory of Intelligent Manufacturing of Advanced Construction Machinery · Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Sungkyunkwan University +2