JET is a conditional flow matching framework that generates EEG as continuous raw sequences with added constraints for spectral and temporal properties, achieving over 40% lower TS-FID than prior discrete denoising methods on three benchmarks.
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Diffusion Transformers with Representation Autoencoders
Canonical reference. 73% of citing Pith papers cite this work as background.
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abstract
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. Most DiTs continue to rely on the original VAE encoder, which introduces several limitations: outdated backbones that compromise architectural simplicity, low-dimensional latent spaces that restrict information capacity, and weak representations that result from purely reconstruction-based training and ultimately limit generative quality. In this work, we explore replacing the VAE with pretrained representation encoders (e.g., DINO, SigLIP, MAE) paired with trained decoders, forming what we term Representation Autoencoders (RAEs). These models provide both high-quality reconstructions and semantically rich latent spaces, while allowing for a scalable transformer-based architecture. Since these latent spaces are typically high-dimensional, a key challenge is enabling diffusion transformers to operate effectively within them. We analyze the sources of this difficulty, propose theoretically motivated solutions, and validate them empirically. Our approach achieves faster convergence without auxiliary representation alignment losses. Using a DiT variant equipped with a lightweight, wide DDT head, we achieve strong image generation results on ImageNet: 1.51 FID at 256x256 (no guidance) and 1.13 at both 256x256 and 512x512 (with guidance). RAE offers clear advantages and should be the new default for diffusion transformer training.
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- abstract 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. Most DiTs continue to rely on the original VAE encoder, which introduces several limitations: outdated backbones that compromise architectural simplicity, low-dimensional latent spaces that restrict information capacity, and weak representations that result from purely reconstruction-based training and ultimately limit generative quality. In this work, we ex
co-cited works
representative citing papers
DRoRAE adaptively fuses multi-layer features from vision encoders via energy-constrained routing to enrich visual tokens, cutting rFID from 0.57 to 0.29 and generation FID from 1.74 to 1.65 on ImageNet-256 while revealing a log-linear scaling law with fusion capacity.
RLA-WM predicts residual latent actions via flow matching to create visual feature world models that outperform prior feature-based and diffusion approaches while enabling offline video-based robot RL.
CoReDi coevolves semantic representations with the diffusion model via a jointly learned linear projection stabilized by stop-gradient, normalization, and regularization, yielding faster convergence and higher sample quality than fixed-representation baselines.
A 3D-grounded autoencoder and diffusion transformer allow direct generation of 3D scenes in an implicit latent space using a fixed 1K-token representation for arbitrary views and resolutions.
SetFlow is a flow-matching generative model for permutation-invariant MIL bags in representation space that produces synthetic data improving classification performance and enabling training on synthetic data alone.
Matched benchmarking reveals FID misleads in few-step regimes under CFG, prompting CLIP-scaled and PickScore-scaled FID and IS variants for better semantic evaluation of one-step image generators.
DREAM introduces Masking Warmup and Semantically Aligned Decoding to let a single encoder handle both contrastive alignment and masked generation, yielding gains over CLIP and FLUID on understanding and generation benchmarks.
PiD is a pixel diffusion decoder that performs latent-to-pixel conversion and 4-8x upsampling in one generative step, enabling early stopping of latent diffusion and achieving sub-second 2048x2048 decoding with claimed better fidelity than cascaded baselines.
A vanilla Diffusion Transformer trained via x-prediction on frozen DINOv2 features reaches FID 1.14 on ImageNet 256x256 with fewer parameters and faster sampling than prior DiT variants.
Spatial Gram Alignment aligns internal self-similarities of LDM features with foundation priors to reconcile global structure and fine details in ultra-high-resolution text-to-image synthesis.
DAR replaces residual addition in DiTs with learnable timestep-adaptive non-incremental aggregation of sublayer outputs, improving FID by 2.11 on ImageNet 256x256 and accelerating convergence by 8.75x.
UniRefiner uses contrastive registers and a dual alignment objective to remove three categories of spurious tokens from pre-trained ViTs, yielding up to 9.4% mIoU gains on ADE20K and 22% zero-shot segmentation improvements.
Lance presents a dual-stream mixture-of-experts model with modality-aware positional encoding and staged multi-task training that outperforms prior open-source unified models on image and video generation while keeping strong understanding performance.
Decouples semantic and spatial tokens in NVS transformers to resolve representation ambiguity, yielding consistent gains with near-zero added latency.
VFMTok builds a generalist image tokenizer on frozen VFMs using adaptive quantization and semantic alignment, delivering gFID 1.36 for autoregressive and 1.25 for continuous generation on ImageNet with 3x faster convergence.
RAE v2 reaches gFID 1.06 on ImageNet-256 in 80 epochs by combining multi-layer encoder sums, complementary REPA targets, and free guidance via output reparameterization.
Pretrained autoencoders in medical latent diffusion encode discriminative features well for reconstruction but structure their latent spaces in ways that hinder classifier learning, a gap that persists across architectures and is not closed by domain fine-tuning.
sREPA enforces structural consistency in relational geometry of pre-trained vision features to accelerate DiT training and improve generation quality.
HyperDiT achieves FID 1.56 on ImageNet 256x256 in pixel space via hyper-connected cross-scale interactions, cross-attention, SA-RoPE, and VFM registers.
DiLA uses content-structure disentanglement driven by predictive bottlenecks to create semantically structured latent actions for high-fidelity video world models.
Decouples Sphere Encoder into fixed pretrained encoder and spherical latent denoiser, yielding higher quality and faster inference than the joint original on Animal-Faces, Oxford-Flowers and ImageNet-1K.
PoDAR disentangles audio signal power from semantic content in latents using power augmentation and consistency objectives, yielding 2x faster convergence and gains of 0.055 speaker similarity and 0.22 UTMOS when applied to Stable Audio VAE with F5-TTS.
Joint training of the latent space with the diffusion process produces a competitive latent diffusion language model that is faster than existing discrete and continuous diffusion baselines.
citing papers explorer
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Let EEG Models Learn EEG
JET is a conditional flow matching framework that generates EEG as continuous raw sequences with added constraints for spectral and temporal properties, achieving over 40% lower TS-FID than prior discrete denoising methods on three benchmarks.
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Beyond the Last Layer: Multi-Layer Representation Fusion for Visual Tokenization
DRoRAE adaptively fuses multi-layer features from vision encoders via energy-constrained routing to enrich visual tokens, cutting rFID from 0.57 to 0.29 and generation FID from 1.74 to 1.65 on ImageNet-256 while revealing a log-linear scaling law with fusion capacity.
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Learning Visual Feature-Based World Models via Residual Latent Action
RLA-WM predicts residual latent actions via flow matching to create visual feature world models that outperform prior feature-based and diffusion approaches while enabling offline video-based robot RL.
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Coevolving Representations in Joint Image-Feature Diffusion
CoReDi coevolves semantic representations with the diffusion model via a jointly learned linear projection stabilized by stop-gradient, normalization, and regularization, yielding faster convergence and higher sample quality than fixed-representation baselines.
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Any 3D Scene is Worth 1K Tokens: 3D-Grounded Representation for Scene Generation at Scale
A 3D-grounded autoencoder and diffusion transformer allow direct generation of 3D scenes in an implicit latent space using a fixed 1K-token representation for arbitrary views and resolutions.
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SetFlow: Generating Structured Sets of Representations for Multiple Instance Learning
SetFlow is a flow-matching generative model for permutation-invariant MIL bags in representation space that produces synthetic data improving classification performance and enabling training on synthetic data alone.
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Setting-Matched and Semantics-Scaled Benchmarking of One-Step Generative Models Against Multistep Diffusion and Flow Models
Matched benchmarking reveals FID misleads in few-step regimes under CFG, prompting CLIP-scaled and PickScore-scaled FID and IS variants for better semantic evaluation of one-step image generators.
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Unifying Contrastive and Generative Objectives for Visual Understanding and Text-to-Image Generation
DREAM introduces Masking Warmup and Semantically Aligned Decoding to let a single encoder handle both contrastive alignment and masked generation, yielding gains over CLIP and FLUID on understanding and generation benchmarks.
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PiD: Fast and High-Resolution Latent Decoding with Pixel Diffusion
PiD is a pixel diffusion decoder that performs latent-to-pixel conversion and 4-8x upsampling in one generative step, enabling early stopping of latent diffusion and achieving sub-second 2048x2048 decoding with claimed better fidelity than cascaded baselines.
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RiT: Vanilla Diffusion Transformers Suffice in Representation Space
A vanilla Diffusion Transformer trained via x-prediction on frozen DINOv2 features reaches FID 1.14 on ImageNet 256x256 with fewer parameters and faster sampling than prior DiT variants.
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Spatial Gram Alignment for Ultra-High-Resolution Image Synthesis
Spatial Gram Alignment aligns internal self-similarities of LDM features with foundation priors to reconcile global structure and fine details in ultra-high-resolution text-to-image synthesis.
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Rethinking Cross-Layer Information Routing in Diffusion Transformers
DAR replaces residual addition in DiTs with learnable timestep-adaptive non-incremental aggregation of sublayer outputs, improving FID by 2.11 on ImageNet 256x256 and accelerating convergence by 8.75x.
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UniRefiner: Teaching Pre-trained ViTs to Self-Dispose Dross via Contrastive Register
UniRefiner uses contrastive registers and a dual alignment objective to remove three categories of spurious tokens from pre-trained ViTs, yielding up to 9.4% mIoU gains on ADE20K and 22% zero-shot segmentation improvements.
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Lance: Unified Multimodal Modeling by Multi-Task Synergy
Lance presents a dual-stream mixture-of-experts model with modality-aware positional encoding and staged multi-task training that outperforms prior open-source unified models on image and video generation while keeping strong understanding performance.
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Resolving Representation Ambiguity in Feedforward Novel View Synthesis Transformer via Semantic-Spatial Decoupling
Decouples semantic and spatial tokens in NVS transformers to resolve representation ambiguity, yielding consistent gains with near-zero added latency.
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Vision Foundation Models as Generalist Tokenizers for Image Generation
VFMTok builds a generalist image tokenizer on frozen VFMs using adaptive quantization and semantic alignment, delivering gFID 1.36 for autoregressive and 1.25 for continuous generation on ImageNet with 3x faster convergence.
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Improved Baselines with Representation Autoencoders
RAE v2 reaches gFID 1.06 on ImageNet-256 in 80 epochs by combining multi-layer encoder sums, complementary REPA targets, and free guidance via output reparameterization.
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The Learnability Gap in Medical Latent Diffusion
Pretrained autoencoders in medical latent diffusion encode discriminative features well for reconstruction but structure their latent spaces in ways that hinder classifier learning, a gap that persists across architectures and is not closed by domain fine-tuning.
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Beyond Point-Wise Matching: Structural Representation Alignment for Accelerating Diffusion Transformers
sREPA enforces structural consistency in relational geometry of pre-trained vision features to accelerate DiT training and improve generation quality.
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HyperDiT: Hyper-Connected Transformers for High-Fidelity Pixel-Space Diffusion
HyperDiT achieves FID 1.56 on ImageNet 256x256 in pixel space via hyper-connected cross-scale interactions, cross-attention, SA-RoPE, and VFM registers.
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DiLA: Disentangled Latent Action World Models
DiLA uses content-structure disentanglement driven by predictive bottlenecks to create semantically structured latent actions for high-fidelity video world models.
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Efficient Image Synthesis with Sphere Latent Encoder
Decouples Sphere Encoder into fixed pretrained encoder and spherical latent denoiser, yielding higher quality and faster inference than the joint original on Animal-Faces, Oxford-Flowers and ImageNet-1K.
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PoDAR: Power-Disentangled Audio Representation for Generative Modeling
PoDAR disentangles audio signal power from semantic content in latents using power augmentation and consistency objectives, yielding 2x faster convergence and gains of 0.055 speaker similarity and 0.22 UTMOS when applied to Stable Audio VAE with F5-TTS.
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How to Train Your Latent Diffusion Language Model Jointly With the Latent Space
Joint training of the latent space with the diffusion process produces a competitive latent diffusion language model that is faster than existing discrete and continuous diffusion baselines.
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What Matters for Diffusion-Friendly Latent Manifold? Prior-Aligned Autoencoders for Latent Diffusion
Prior-Aligned AutoEncoders shape latent manifolds with spatial coherence, local continuity, and global semantics to improve latent diffusion, achieving SOTA gFID 1.03 on ImageNet 256x256 with up to 13x faster convergence.
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Continuous Latent Diffusion Language Model
Cola DLM proposes a hierarchical latent diffusion model that learns a text-to-latent mapping, fits a global semantic prior in continuous space with a block-causal DiT, and performs conditional decoding, establishing latent prior modeling as an alternative to token-level autoregressive language model
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ViTok-v2: Scaling Native Resolution Auto-Encoders to 5 Billion Parameters
ViTok-v2 is a 5B-parameter native-resolution image autoencoder using NaFlex and DINOv3 loss that matches or exceeds prior tokenizers at 256p and outperforms them at 512p and above while advancing the Pareto frontier in joint scaling with generators.
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Taming Outlier Tokens in Diffusion Transformers
Outlier tokens in DiTs are addressed with Dual-Stage Registers, which reduce artifacts and improve image generation on ImageNet and text-to-image tasks.
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End-to-End Autoregressive Image Generation with 1D Semantic Tokenizer
An end-to-end autoregressive model with a jointly trained 1D semantic tokenizer achieves state-of-the-art FID 1.48 on ImageNet 256x256 generation without guidance.
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Beyond Gaussian Bottlenecks: Topologically Aligned Encoding of Vision-Transformer Feature Spaces
S²VAE replaces Gaussian bottlenecks with hyperspherical Power Spherical latents in a VAE on VGGT features, yielding better results on depth estimation, camera pose recovery, and point cloud reconstruction especially at high compression.
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CoreFlow: Low-Rank Matrix Generative Models
CoreFlow is a low-rank matrix generative model that trains normalizing flows on shared subspaces to improve efficiency and quality for high-dimensional limited-sample data, including incomplete matrices.
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Tuna-2: Pixel Embeddings Beat Vision Encoders for Multimodal Understanding and Generation
Tuna-2 shows that direct pixel embeddings can replace vision encoders in unified multimodal models, achieving competitive generation and stronger understanding at scale.
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Latent Denoising Improves Visual Alignment in Large Multimodal Models
A latent denoising objective with saliency-aware corruption and contrastive distillation improves visual alignment and corruption robustness in large multimodal models.
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Denoising, Fast and Slow: Difficulty-Aware Adaptive Sampling for Image Generation
Patch Forcing enables diffusion models to denoise image patches at varying rates based on predicted difficulty, advancing easier regions first to improve context and achieve better generation quality on ImageNet while scaling to text-to-image tasks.
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Extending One-Step Image Generation from Class Labels to Text via Discriminative Text Representation
By requiring and using highly discriminative LLM text features, the work enables the first effective one-step text-conditioned image generation with MeanFlow.
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OFlow: Injecting Object-Aware Temporal Flow Matching for Robust Robotic Manipulation
OFlow unifies temporal foresight and object-aware reasoning inside a shared latent space via flow matching to improve VLA robustness in robotic manipulation under distribution shifts.
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Generative Refinement Networks for Visual Synthesis
GRN uses hierarchical binary quantization and entropy-guided refinement to set new ImageNet records of 0.56 rFID for reconstruction and 1.81 gFID for class-conditional generation while releasing code and models.
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Representations Before Pixels: Semantics-Guided Hierarchical Video Prediction
Re2Pix decomposes video prediction into semantic feature forecasting followed by representation-conditioned diffusion synthesis, with nested dropout and mixed supervision to handle prediction errors.
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Continuous Adversarial Flow Models
Continuous adversarial flow models replace MSE in flow matching with adversarial training via a discriminator, improving guidance-free FID on ImageNet from 8.26 to 3.63 for SiT and similar gains for JiT and text-to-image benchmarks.
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TC-AE: Unlocking Token Capacity for Deep Compression Autoencoders
TC-AE improves reconstruction and generative performance in deep compression by decomposing token-to-latent compression into two stages and using joint self-supervised training.
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Flow Map Language Models: One-step Language Modeling via Continuous Denoising
Continuous flows on token embeddings with flow-map distillation produce one-step language models whose quality exceeds recent 8-step discrete diffusion baselines on LM1B and OpenWebText.
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Protein Autoregressive Modeling via Multiscale Structure Generation
PAR is a multi-scale autoregressive transformer framework for protein backbone generation that uses coarse-to-fine prediction, noisy context learning, and flow-based decoding to achieve high-quality unconditional and zero-shot conditional outputs.
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PixelGen: Improving Pixel Diffusion with Perceptual Supervision
PixelGen augments pixel diffusion with gated perceptual supervision to reach FID 5.11 on ImageNet-256 and GenEval 0.79 in text-to-image, narrowing the gap to latent methods without VAEs.
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A Systematic Evaluation of Co-folding Model Representations for Small-Molecule Learning
Boltz2 co-folding representations match or exceed existing models on ADMET benchmarks, accelerate generative modeling, and improve sample efficiency in ligand optimization while being complementary to 3D, bioassay, and quantum-chemical supervision.
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C3G: Learning Compact 3D Representations with 2K Gaussians
C3G creates compact 3D Gaussian representations with 2K points by guiding placement via learnable tokens that aggregate multi-view features through attention, yielding better efficiency and performance than dense methods.
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PixelDiT: Pixel Diffusion Transformers for Image Generation
PixelDiT generates images in pixel space with a dual-level transformer and reaches 1.61 FID on ImageNet 256, outperforming prior pixel-space models.
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Back to Basics: Let Denoising Generative Models Denoise
Directly predicting clean data with large-patch pixel Transformers enables strong generative performance in diffusion models where noise prediction fails at high dimensions.
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SAME: A Semantically-Aligned Music Autoencoder
SAME is a semantically regularized transformer autoencoder for music that delivers 4096x compression with open-weights release of large and small variants.
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WinTok: A Win-Win Hybrid Tokenizer via Decomposing Visual Understanding and Generation with Transferable Tokens
WinTok is a hybrid visual tokenizer that supplements pixel tokens with learnable semantic tokens distilled asymmetrically from foundation models to improve reconstruction, understanding, and generation.
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FrequencyBooster: Full-Frequency Modeling for High-Fidelity Pixel Diffusion
FrequencyBooster reports state-of-the-art FID scores of 1.60 at 256x256 and 1.69 at 512x512 for pixel diffusion by using a specialized decoder for full-frequency modeling.